Better Software Magazine Archive:

May/June 2014

IN THIS ISSUE

Why Am I Always Getting Bad News in the Eleventh Hour?
By Kenton Bohn
Ryan McClish

This article is a departure from previous columns. Kenton and Ryan role play the stress and friction between a typical product manager and an engineering team lead. This article may make you squirm, but it brings out the issues of teams attempting to do the best thing from completely different perspectives.

My Team Is Agile, but My Organization Is Not! What Can I Do?
By Sanjiv Augustine

In this FAQ column, Sanjiv Augustine advises how to upgrade your organization's portfolio management by addressing inefficient, outdated, and value-killing portfolio management processes.

What's a Professional?
By Johanna Rothman

For years we've all heard how software development and IT are a mixture of art and science. As our industry matures and becomes more mainstream, Johanna wants to upset the apple cart by suggesting that there's a  missing and sorely needed ingredient—professionalism.

Developing Custom Apps for the Cloud
By Pete Morano
Matt Stratton

With the cloud providing tremendous freedom like instant deployment of updates, you're definitely going to have to adjust how you develop and deploy apps. Pete and Matt have created a list of things you need to consider when developing apps for the cloud.

Attacking Quality Issues in Data Warehousing
By Wayne Yaddow

To fully detect, isolate, and resolve quality issues in a traditional, large-scale data warehouse requires that several approaches be used together. Wayne identifies types of data quality issues and then illustrates how to best attack and resolve those pesky issues.

Is Software Configuration Management Technology Regressing?
By Joe Farah

There are ever-growing ways to organize your project assets with public domain configuration management tools. There's a mistaken belief that these free software configuration management (SCM) alternatives can be just as powerful as leading commercial tools.

We Value Your Feedback - Editor's Note
By Ken Whitaker

Better Software magazine editor Ken Whitaker introduces the May/June 2014 issue, highlighting the feature articles and detailing how readers can provide their feedback.

Avoiding the Prioritization Trap
By Brandon Carlson

With incoming priorities being requested by just about everybody, how in the world can you and your team prioritize? Brandon shows you some innovative techniques that you can use to turn chaos into order.  One surprising approach is simply handling priorities on a first-in, first-out basis.

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