Articles
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Build or Buy? 5 Reasons Why Your Application Needs an Error Monitoring System Versus Building Your Own The best way to ensure users have a positive customer experience is to use error monitoring to catch errors in real time so you can respond immediately. Error monitoring provides hope for avoiding poor app store ratings and for keeping customers satisfied. |
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Has Continuous Deployment Become a New Worst Practice? Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you? |
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How Much Work Can You Do—Developing and Managing Your Project Portfolio Knowing how much work your group can accomplish—and how much it takes to complete that work—is critical to your success as a manager. Johanna Rothman explains how to ascertain your team's potential and how to use that information to define and manage your project portfolio so it doesn't manage you. |
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Thinking Inside the Box The problem with urging outside-the-box thinking is that many of us do a less-than-stellar job of thinking inside the box. We often fail to realize the options and opportunities that are blatantly visible inside the box that could dramatically improve our chances of success. In this column, Naomi Karten points out how we fall victim to familiar traps, such as doing things the same old (ineffective) way or discounting colleague and teammate ideas. Thinking outside of the box can generate innovative and ingenious ideas and outcomes, but the results will flop when teammates ignore the ideas inside the box. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Measure the Measurable: Improving Software Quality Through Telemetry Observing customers in a usability lab can be invaluable for improving product design. But, once your software leaves the lab, do you know what your customers are actually doing and whether or not your software meets their expectations? Learn how engineers on the Microsoft Office team apply a variety of software telemetry techniques to understand real-world usage, how the results drive product improvements, and how you can apply similar techniques. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Metrics that Motivate To implement a meaningful incentive system for your team, you need to select metrics that encourage the behaviors you need and the results you want. But first you have to decide what you need and want. |
Interviews
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Data Visualization in Test Automation: A Conversation with Greg Paskal
Video
Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays. |
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Best Practices for Lean Documentation: An Interview with Craeg Strong
Podcast
In this interview, Craeg Strong speaks about his upcoming presentation, meeting strict documentation requirements in agile, how agile documentation differs from traditional governance, the advantages and disadvantages to taking your documentation agile, and the art of a company turnaround. |
Conference Presentations
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Shift Your Perspective on Data and Influence Stakeholders
Slideshow
With all the open source tools available in the market, it can be overwhelming to determine which might meet your needs and which will work best in your environment. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship between data and your environment, and using data to help make... |
Jennifer Bonine
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Lessons Learned from Forty-five Years of Software Measurement
Slideshow
Counting is easy. However, what makes measurement really valuable-and really hard to get right-is knowing what to count and what to do with the results. If your organization is mostly tracking resource usage, costs, and schedule data, it is making a big mistake. What about the users? The customers? The overall business strategy? Sharing the lessons he has learned from fighting-and surviving-many software measurement battles, Ed Weller offers a step-by-step approach for implementing a practical and valuable metrics program. After understanding what measures are most important to the business strategy and all stakeholders, the next step is to decide what data supports those measures and how to capture it. With data in hand, you can create simple and informative ways to make the resulting metrics visible and easy to digest. The biggest challenges-avoidance, disbelief, and rationalization-come next. |
Edward Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
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