Better Software Magazine Articles

Three Pounds of Manure in a Two-Pound Sack

Multitasking is not a magical cure for getting too much work done by too few resources. Listen in as Payson Hall eavesdrops on a coaching session between two managers about how to assign and prioritize work.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
Learning from Experience: Software Testers Need More than Book Learning

People often point to requirements documents and process manuals as ways to guide a new tester. Research into knowledge transfer, as described in The Social Life of Information, suggests that there is much more to the process of learning. Michael Bolton describes his own experiences on a new project, noting how the documentation helped ... and didn't.

Michael Bolton's picture Michael Bolton
Resistance Is Futile

Why do so many people resist change, even when that change will be for the better? It's simple, really. Every change ends something, and endings mean loss. People don't like loss. Even the best changes mean something familiar will end.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
What's It Mean? ...Reducing Imprecision to Improve Verification

Imprecise language makes understanding and, therefore, software verification more difficult. This article describes techniques for detecting and repairing vague and ambiguous software requirements.

David Gelperin's picture David Gelperin
Navigating Conflict

On good agile teams, conflict is frequent and viewed as normal. On great agile teams, conflict is constant and welcome as a catapult to high performance. What can we do to help teams chart their course through conflict so that it turns into a constructive force for greatness?

Lyssa Adkins's picture Lyssa Adkins
The Missing Measurement

In these times, many of us are being told to "do more with less." A more useful approach is "invest our organization's scarce resources where the return is the greatest." To do so, we must define the financial benefits sought when developing a system in addition to its requirements.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
Go, Team!

Fed up with good-ol'-boy salesmen, a manufacturing mindset, and just-get-it-out-the-door directions? A little assertiveness, a few ounces of patience, a dash of charm, a lot of leadership, and some attitude adjustment by everyone might help. Read how one manager made the world a better place to work one small victory at a time.

Patrick Bailey's picture Patrick Bailey
Questions You Should Ask

It's a technique children and teenagers have mastered: asking "why" until they get to an acceptable response (or until we're too tired to continue answering). Find out how Michele Sliger uses a similar approach designed by Six Sigma to drill down into the underlying cause of any problem within software projects. She then continues the inquisition with a series of other questions in order to find out how these problems affect business value and technology. Read on to learn what these questions are and how you can start using them to find out why things aren't going as planned.

Michele Sliger's picture Michele Sliger
The Abolition of Ignorance

The testing profession isn't easily mastered, and isn't something that can be perfected by practice alone. Good testers study testing to improve their knowledge of the areas they know about, but great testers strive to find out about areas of software testing they don't yet realize they don't know about.

Alan Page's picture Alan Page
Six Thinking Hats for Testers

Fresh ideas can provoke us into discovering great insights: Six thinking hats did just that for Julian Harty, who then applied them to software testing with great success. He, and tens of others, has found the thinking hats easy to use, practical, and very productive. Read on to find out how you can apply them to your work.

Julian Harty

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