Are you striving for more quality than you really need? How would you know? "Good enough" quality does not mean "substandard" or "mediocre" but is actually an optimal and responsible economic principle we use everyday. Managing test lead for Quardev Laboratories, Jon Bach says because quality is expensive, the "good enough" framework provides the criteria to enhance decision-making about when to ship. He discusses the perils of quality-at-all-cost techniques and shares examples of software that features sufficient quality. Find out how testers and test managers can help project stakeholders know whether they are releasing software with too little quality or are unnecessarily striving for too much quality.

We seem to be under a curse in our profession. Although not cast by a witch or a wizard, the curse affects us just the same. It is the curse of "either/or"-the curse that we must choose either "this" or "that" but we cannot choose parts of both. Nowhere is this more evident than in today's struggle between the adherents of the traditional "plan-driven" and newer "Agile" approaches to software development. What most overlook is that both groups want to achieve exactly the same goal: quality software that meets customer needs within the constraints of time, budget, staff, and technology. They differ only on the strategies to achieve this goal. For example, both groups agree that system requirements must be understood; their differences lie in questions of "how much of what to do and when to do it." Lee Copeland offers insights and suggestions on the methods and approaches that will be most valued on your project-control vs.

The Agile development movement has started to transform the software landscape. Since February 2001 when the Agile Manifesto was published, Agile development has gone past the early adopter phase and now is regularly in use by such mainstream organizations as CapitalOne, the Federal Reserve Bank, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and major development departments in other organizations. For Agile practices to take hold-and more importantly to be sustained-all of the dysfunctional behaviors that organizations have acquired over the past twenty years or more must be discarded-and that is not easy or fun. However, the overwhelming benefits and value of Agile development are there, and for organizations in which software is their lifeblood, the effort will be made.

Software success is strongly influenced by how you finish a project. For that, a special set of skills is required. Many projects fail in their endgame during testing, not because of the testing itself but because of the late discovery of defects and functional gaps that show the software as not viable. Join Robert Galen as he focuses on a set of high level practices and techniques that will help improve your management and steering within the endgame. Learn about a release framework with the right testing tempo and key milestones. Define formal release criteria and add flexibility and depth to your defect fix-don't fix decisions. As a manager in the difficult release endgame, your behavior and leadership can make the difference between a successful release and perceived failure. Robert’s guidance will increase the odds of successfully delivering your release.