The Latest

Skilled testing—an important part of creating valuable technology—is under attack. We need to rethink the problem, analyze why people resist testing, and create approaches to make it more engaging. Gamification provides one model to help us improve our approach.

Much like the biblical horsemen of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death, the "Four Horsemen of the Testing Apocalypse" ride into our lives and work bearing great challenges. If the software of tomorrow is to be better than the software of today, we must face these foes directly.

Steve Berczuk speaks with Dan Wellman about the agile practice of test-driven development (TDD), including prerequisites to instituting TDD, the technical and cultural challenges to using it, and some ideal (and not-so-ideal) contexts for it.

Johanna Rothman shares some of her highlights of the past year, which has been her first full year as the technical editor for the Agile Journal, now called Agile Connection.

In an earlier article, Dan Horvath explored some history and definitions of agile and how Function Point Analysis (FPA) can be used in the measurement of agile projects. Dan emphasizes that the definition of the project is critical to this process. In this article, Dan demonstrates the use of FPA in agile development through a hands-on example.

For development, a production application should be fully baked and not in what would be considered a “development” state. Tracy Ragan explains that frequent releases are a basic requirement of rapid development methodologies like agile and this impacts the way in which development teams and production control teams must interact.

In classic Scrum textbooks, the Product Owner (PO) permanently hangs out in the agile team room, churning out a stream of user stories, regularly prioritizing the backlog, deciding color schemes for screen design-all while keeping the team