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Articles

The Challenge of Coping with Chaos

When you face the discomfort and uncertainty brought about by change, it's tempting to want to do something to deal with the situation. But, acting precipitously could be a big mistake. In this column, Naomi Karten explains why and offers some suggestions of what to do instead.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
financial chart Rocks into Gold: Part 3

This short book by Clarke Ching is a "biztech" parable for software developers who want to survive—and then thrive—through the credit crunch. We have republished the book in a four-part series. In part three, when things seem at their very worst, Bob has a "light bulb moment" that just might save the day. Follow the story as our characters fight to keep their jobs by implementing creative business ideas and management skills taken from agile development.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
Agile and Lean: Recognizing the Synergy

Bob Aiello explains the process to reaching agile comes from more than simply declaring yourself as such. The road to agile is a journal, and one that requires hard work. But once you get there, the benefits can be immense. Making sure everyone on board is dedicated to the cause to reach the goal.

Bob Aiello's picture Bob Aiello
Distributed Agile: An Interview with Vishwanath Nagara

In this interview with Vishwanath Nagaraj, originally published in the Sticky ToolLook eNewsletter, he discusses the concept of distributed agile and some of the tools that help make the idea a reality.

Joey McAllister's picture Joey McAllister
To SME or Not To SME

Subject matter experts (SMEs) serve important roles on a project and are especially pivotal during the testing phase. In this week's column, Dion Johnson explores how SMEs positively and negatively affect testing and what you can do to make sure you have the right amount of SMEs on your testing team.

Dion Johnson's picture Dion Johnson
Project Time Reporting

Project time reporting evokes a passionate response from most team members-- the consensus is they hate it. While Payson Hall worries about supporting something so unpopular, he offers benefits of project time reporting and explores some of the common implementation issues that undermine its value.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
Rocks into Gold: Part 2

This short book, written by Clarke Ching, is a "biztech" parable for software developers who want to survive—and then thrive—through a credit crunch. We have republished the book in a four-part series. In part two, Bob, Bill, and Sam discover how a rocky economy can flip project costs and return on investments and how much money could be lost by canning the FBU project. Can they use these projections to save the project and their jobs?

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
project portfolio chart No: Such a Difficult Word

When people begin to get overworked, it's common to fall back on blaming the old chestnut "time management." But the problem may have less to do with how you allocate time to projects than your inability to say no to some of those projects in the first place. In this article, Johanna Rothman takes a look at the difficulty of saying no and offers some suggestions for overcoming it.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Timing Matters in Managing Change

Implementing change can be a colossal challenge. People tend to prefer what's familiar, safe, and predictable to that which is new, unfamiliar, uncertain, confusing, or potentially risky. But the timing of a change effort can influence how readily people accept the change and adjust to it.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
Independent Testers? Or Independent Thinkers?

In this article, Lisa Crispin recalls a time when testers alone were solely responsible for software quality, and compares that to more modern thinking where collaboration between developers and testers is king. Software quality is everyone's job, sometimes it takes independence to get there.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin

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