The Latest

Whether it is controlling interplanetary spacecraft, managing medical records, or "merely" staying in business, it seems that more of us are facing the pressure of building and managing mission-critical systems and teams.

In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes.

Scott Ambler is chief methodologist for IT with IBM Rational. Heather Shanholtzer recently had the opportunity to talk to Scott about scaling agile for enterprise organizations, how agile affects leadership and requirements on large teams, and his Disciplined Agile Delivery framework.

C-Cover by Bullseye Testing Technology is a code coverage analyzer that gathers and displays run time coverage statistics of C and C++ source code. Its capabilities include instrumenting the source code, accumulating the code's run time data, and displaying the data in its browser. This article describes Peter Wlodarski's experience using the program.

By understanding the context in which their existing practices were meant to work, teams new to agile can more easily decide which of those practices still make sense and which are simply security blankets.

Testers are people who ask questions, think critically about the answers, and then ask more questions—repeatedly. Fiona Charles reminds testers that their success depends on maintaining a healthy skepticism.

This article explains methods to build a team that will embrace "required work" and deliver robust software in a predictable fashion. It proposes a measure that helps calculate the throughput of an agile team by comparing work committed to work actually done.