Articles
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3 Ways to Be More Agile in a Fixed-Price Project Fixed-price projects are a challenge to manage when using agile practices, as software teams need the flexibility to change what they are building based on customer need, and that often alters what can be done within a fixed budget. However, there are ways to achieve agility even within a fixed-budget constraint. Here are three ways to make a fixed-price project a win for all parties involved. |
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How Agile Reduces Product Risk With traditional software development methods, you are betting that end-of-lifecycle testing will let your team correct all risks, but experience has taught us that this seldom happens. With agile, you are incrementally reducing risk with every iteration and release you do, mitigating risks as you go. This article examines each of the value statements from the Agile Manifesto to illustrate how agile ultimately helps us reduce product risk. |
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DevSecOps: Incorporate Security into DevOps to Reduce Software Risk DevSecOps is a growing movement to incorporate security into DevOps practices in order to ensure flaws and weaknesses are exposed early on through monitoring, assessment, and analysis, so remediation can be implemented far earlier than traditional efforts. By failing fast with security testing, organizations reduce risk of a security incident and decrease the cost of rework. |
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Prevent Disaster by Righting Cultural Dysfunction on Your Team The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were two of NASA's biggest disasters. Investigations into these accidents discovered the engineering issues responsible, but management practices and cultural barriers also were found to be contributing factors. Does your organization have a healthy culture that lets you safely voice concerns? It could help you prevent tragedy. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Managing Risk in an Agile World Most software projects take great pains to identify and mitigate risks. Traditional risk analysis techniques can be subjective, time-consuming, and complicated. All it takes is a simple spreadsheet. |
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A Radical View of Software Licensing and Piracy Software vendors are making extraordinary efforts to protect the installation and use of apps, but have they gone too far? Preventing software piracy can have an adverse effect on genuine users. Software licensing technology, according to Steve, needs to strike the best balance of protecting the asset while trusting the customer. |
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Reading the Tea Leaves: Predicting a Project's Future Project assessment and forecasting aren't magic. Payson Hall examines six factors that can increase the likelihood of project success. |
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Using Mission and Risk Diagnostics to Enhance Business Continuity Noah Gamer explains that mission and risk diagnostics provide an excellent approach to risk management for any company. Using these elements together, an organization can create a better business continuity strategy. While risk is not always bad, identifying and mitigating risks can help your organization achieve success. |
Interviews
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A Firsthand Agile Transition Success Story: An Interview with Penny Wyatt In this interview, Penny Wyatt discusses her Agile Development Conference West session, "Transform Your Agile Test Process to Ship Fast with High Quality," to share some of the ways she and her team achieved success, and how they—and you—can continue to develop and grow together. |
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Security Testing in an Agile World: An Interview with Jeff Payne Jeffrey Payne sat down with Noel Wurst to discuss a range of topics, including advice for teams that are attempting agile for the first time, the importance of clear communication between teams, and the ways that security testing has changed alongside modern technology. |
Conference Presentations
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Risk Based Testing: Communicating WHY You Can't Test Everything
Slideshow
The idea of testing everything is a popular one—in fact many stakeholders think that’s exactly what their quality teams do. It usually isn’t and can’t be; but how can teams communicate this? Join Jenny Bramble as she helps to pave the way using the language of risk-based testing. By defining risk in two simple parts, the team and project have a tangible and usable metric. She shares how to apply this metric and use it to determine where the team should focus testing, making it more effective and efficient whilst communicating that effort through the creation of a risk matrix. As a result, risk becomes the right language for the team to communicate clearly and concisely with everyone involved in the project by using agreed-upon words and definitions. Take away a set of tools that can be used to facilitate both better testing and better communication though precise use of language and risk matrixes. |
Jenny Bramble
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Risk Based Testing – Are You Talking the Talk, Or Walking the Walk?
Slideshow
Risk-based testing is essential to focus our testing, but it is not always easy to apply to our projects. Risk management tends to focus more on project and process risks (i.e., Will we make the deadline? Do we follow our processes?) and less on the product risks that can act as a foundation for a risk-based approach to test. Including this aspect of risk in your test coverage will give you a solid foundation for defining a test strategy that implements and executes the right tests with the right intensity to mitigate the most critical product risks. In this presentation, Gitte Ottosen walks you through approaches to lightweight product risk analysis that can be applied whether you are working in a traditional or agile context. The approaches focus on the conversation around identifying and classifying product risks as a team effort, as well as how to use product risk analysis to support test specification and execution. |
Gitte Ottosen
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Agile Testing Is All about Risk—Not Bugs and Quality
Slideshow
Many organizations make huge investments in software testing, and unfortunately they often don’t understand or extract full value from these activities. This can lead to testing being viewed as a mere formality or necessary evil within an organization. Fortunately, we can deliver more... |
Heather Fullen
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Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse
Slideshow
Most of us dread failures. But things go wrong. We can become paralyzed by the fear of being the creator of the next outage or critical bug. After a failure, we often hold a postmortem, but this rarely addresses how we can be more proactive in preventing catastrophes. Considering our... |
Siva Katir
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