The Latest
Help Wanted: Hiring a Software Tester With an Agile Attitude[magazine] What can you do to ensure you hire a tester with an agile attitude? Lisa Crispin explains the approach her team used to find a new tester with both the right skills and the right attitude. |
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Tester PI: Performance Investigator[magazine] Finding avoidable, show-stopping problems when performance testing late in a project is, unfortunately, not uncommon. But Scott Barber says you can save time and money on your software development projects by investigating performance early and validating performance last. |
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Feature-Driven Development: An Agile Alternative to Extreme Programming[article] Feature-driven development (FDD) has the more traditional progression of a systems-engineering life cycle mode as compared to agile methods. It uses distinct phases in its iterations while still being highly iterative and collaborative. FDD does conduct up-front planning, design and documentation and relies very heavily upon domain modeling. |
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Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices - Part 2 of 4[article] Michele Sliger understands the turmoil project management practitioners go through in the transition from plan-driven approaches to agile methodologies. Michelle continues her four-part series relating Project Management Institute (PMI) best practices--as identified in the PMBOK--to agile practices. |
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Where in the World?—Is Your Test Strategy Multicultural?[magazine] Good software travels far and wide, and for rapid testers that means one of their goals is to discover risks associated with the product's operating differently with respect to some distinct locale. That's why Michael Bolton says "localizability" is preferred "internationalization," because the new target market may not be in a different country at all. |
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Feedback Before Firing[magazine] If someone on your project team isn't working up to par, it might take more than a simple showing of your disapproval to put him on the right track. Johanna Rothman suggests trying specific and useful feedback--show your employees the light before you show them the door. |
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Logging a Path to Code Clarity[magazine] A good log file may be the best tool to track down those "cannot reproduce" bugs, but creating the best log takes a certain amount of careful nurturing. In this article, Tod Golding explains why log files can be worth every extra line of code. |
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How to Merge XML Data with a Database[article] In his article "Data Crunching Tips and Techniques," Greg Wilson taught us how to translate legacy data into XML. In the second half, he explains how to merge new data into an existing database. Developers will always face these types of data crunching problems, and knowing the standard data crunching tools can save you a lot of time. Greg also shares the basic knowledge about relational databases that every developer should possess. |
Greg Wilson
April 6, 2006 |
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Achieving Agility in Globally Distributed Software Development[article] In today's business climate there exists an ever-increasing demand to achieve more from less. More return from less investment, faster time to market from shrinking resources, higher quality from collapsing timelines. The impact of these pressures on the software development industry has meant that organizations have had to look for new avenues such as offshore development to reduce costs yet still satisfy these increasing demands. Simply incorporating an offshore development strategy to realize lower costs is not a solution. Leveraging the lower cost and resource scalability that an offshore development strategy provides must also include the facilities to enable that capability to produce better results faster. |
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Agile at Scale: 7+7 Practices for Enterprise Agility[article] Part II of II - Seven Additional Practices For Enterprise Agility In part I of this Article, we noted that the benefits of agile software methods, including faster time to market, better responsiveness to changing customer needs and higher quality are undeniable to those who have mastered these practices. However, these practices have been developed and refined in circumstances characterized by small, co-located teams with ready access to a customer. Can enterprises building applications that require hundreds of distributed team members benefit from these practices, or are they forever doomed to large, late, stage-gate and waterfall-like results? |
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A Look at GreenBlue Inspector by Ecyware[magazine] Why should hackers have all the good tools? Marnie Hutcheson takes a look at Ecyware's GreenBlue Inspector, an inexpensive tool that automates gray box vulnerability testing for simple data types, buffer overflow, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting in forms, cookies, and client requests. |
Marnie Hutcheson
March 30, 2006 |
Stress Testing - What a Load![magazine] People often ask software quality specialist Scott Ames how they can increase stress in their projects. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he responds with some steps that are guaranteed to increase the overall stress on people and projects. |
Scott G. Ames
March 30, 2006 |
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Held Hostage by a Prima Donna[magazine] This installment of Management Chronicles relates the story of an office that has been overtaken by the whims of a real prima donna. Is the value of one indispensable person worth risking the productivity of the entire team? Author Esther Derby offers her insights. |
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Patterns Without Purpose[magazine] Architectural patterns are a convenient way to design and build your code, but be careful not to bite off more than you can chew. Tod Golding offers advice on avoiding useless layers and letting each pattern earn its way into your architecture. |
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Maintaining Your Course[magazine] What does maintainability mean to you? Michael Bolton discusses the different elements of this often-overlooked attribute of software projects and what it means as a guideword heuristic to rapid testers. |