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A letter from the Better Software magazine editor.

In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Claire Lohr answers one of the questions students ask her most often.

Kent McDonald writes that teams often assume that they cannot split their changes into small stories because the resulting stories would not provide value. What they fail to realize is that they can split these bigger changes into smaller changes and gain value by showing their stakeholders, getting feedback, and incorporating that feedback in their continued development.

There is a common misconception that agile and CMMI cannot work together. CMMI is viewed as a documentation heavy, slow, process-driven model—the polar opposite of agile principles. The cost of documentation for an appraisal is viewed as another drawback. Join Ed Weller to see why...

Agile teams move faster when cycle times are short and code deployments are frequent. To release often, a robust suite of automated tests is a must-have. Tests are the safety net that enables fearless change. Throughout a software system's lifespan, its test suite grows, evolves, and decays.

Kent Beck, inventor of eXtreme Programming, defined agile success as delivering more useful functionality with fewer defects. Against that definition, early research revealed mixed success. Many organizations did not know how to measure and thus could not have “fact-based” conversations...

Requirements defects are often the source of the majority of all software defects. Discovering and correcting a defect during testing is typically twenty-five times more expensive than correcting it during the requirements definition phase. Identifying and removing defects early in the...