The Latest
Agile Conversations[article] This article is a collection of conversations that demonstrates some of the tangible and intangible benefits of successful agile implementation. Some of the conversations were written down during sprint retrospectives, but others were documented as part of a concerted effort to simply observe some of the behaviors and dialogues of collocated individuals in a real agile environment. |
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Electric Cloud Reaps Rewards of Continuous Integration and Developer Builds[article] Electric Cloud, a leading provider of software production management tools, has always employed an iterative, agile approach to its software development. But like many fast-paced technology companies, a script-driven, manual approach and once-daily integration builds could not scale effectively to support its growth. Through a mix of tools and best practices, Electric Cloud was able to deploy an end-to-end build and change management system with fully automated continuous integration (CI). This new software production system has reduced the time Electric Cloud engineers spend on software production by more than 30 percent and has saved the company an estimated $700,000 per year. |
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An Uncomfortable Truth about Agile Testing[article] One characteristic of agile development is continuous involvement from testers throughout the process. Testers have a hard and busy job. Jeff has finally starting to understand why testing in agile development is fundamentally different. |
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Modern Distributed Teams[magazine] Traditionally, managing distributed teams has been perceived as difficult. But the advent of effective modern processes and tools is breaking through the obstacles and making distributed teams a viable—and valuable—option. Find out how to make the most of people, processes, and tools to create and maintain a successful distributed team. |
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How Much Is Enough?—Exploring Exploratory Software Testing[magazine] Exploratory testers design and execute tests in the moment, starting with an open mission and investigating new ideas as they arise. But how do we know when to stop? The first step is to recognize that we can't know when we're done, because any approach to answering the stopping question is necessarily heuristic. |
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What's In a Word?[magazine] Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?" |
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Mind the Gap[magazine] The requirements composition table is an effective technique comprising six steps that will help you assess an application's test coverage and identify gaps in your test suite even if you don't have any software requirements specifications. |
Yuri Chernak
February 27, 2008 |
Software Development Worst Practices[magazine] While some debate which, if any, industry practices deserve the designation "best practices," this tongue-in-cheek look at the horrors of some of software's "worst practices" drives home the value of the good ones and may help us improve the quality of our software. |
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Breaking Ground on SOA: How to Build and Test Your First Web Service[magazine] Web services are the foundation of today's service-oriented architecture. This article will teach you how to build a Web service from the ground up as well as how to test it using the three pillars of Web services testing—functional, performance, and interoperability tests. |
Mamoon Yunus
February 27, 2008 |
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The Other Side of Complexity[magazine] Software development has always been an exercise in managing complexity because there appears to be no end to the problems to which we can apply automatic computation. It has progressed as a discipline as good minds have created abstractions that transform that complexity into simplicity. |
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Make Your Mission Possible[magazine] Defining the work that belongs in your group and the work that doesn't belong can be challenging. A strong mission statement can help you defend your stance on what work you will and will not do, while ensuring you still provide the work your organization values. |
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Is Collaboration the Right Way to Work?[article] Do you manage a team or a group? How can you tell the difference, and is it important to differentiate the two? In this column, Esther Derby explains that identifying your associates as one or the other is paramount to how they should be managed. |
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Multi-user, Multi-process Test Automation[article] There is a saying about how to make software: First you make it work; then you make it good; then you make it fast. If you have working test automation, and if your test automation is finding bugs, then the next step is to make your tests run fast. This article talks about handling two things you will need to address to make that happen: users and processes. |
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The Agile Project Management Office (Agile PMO)[article] Traditional program management offices (PMOs) are responsible for providing checks and balances to the development and IT organizations regarding budget and schedule. Oversight and management that comes from the PMO drives certain behaviors in the project managers and, therefore, in the project staff. Similarly, the Agile PMO provides certain checks and balance, but principally focuses on the holistic well-being of the project. |
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Adopting Agile[article] Without a universal definition of agile, it can be difficult to separate those who are truly practicing agile, and those who have it wrong. While agile has grown immensely popular over the years, there are still some who have yet to convert. We took a look at each of these groups. |