Articles

Agile in Motion: Beginner's Mind and Promiscuous Pairing

In this Iterations interview, an excerpt of which was originally published in the April 9, 2008 issue of the Iterations newsletter, Arlo Belshee discusses the concepts of "beginner's mind" and "promiscuous pairing."

A Word with the Wise: Configuration Management Tips from Steve Berczuk

In this short interview with editor Joey McAllister, Steve Berczuk offers some tips to organizations dealing with configuration management (CM) issues.

Reusability vs. Usability: Where to Draw the Line?

Arbitrary reuse of code components could deteriorate overall usability. In this week's column, Linda Hayes explains the good and bad qualities of reusability and five factors one should keep in mind when managing reusability to get the most of it.

Automating Your Regression Test Cases

Companies that develop and maintain software can dramatically improve the quality of their software releases by creating regression test cases that ensure existing features are not broken with new releases. This newsletter discusses: how to create regression test cases, when to automate regression test cases, and the best practices for automation analysis.

Defining Requirements When the Time Frame is Short

Recent industry studies show that modern software projects on average spend 40 percent of their effort on rework. As a result, over 60 percent of software projects overrun budgets, miss schedules, and substantially reduce delivered functionality. This article describes how to define requirements in an Agile environment, including a survey of the most popular methodologies used.

Transitioning from Analysis to Design

The step between specifying requirements to working on a system design can be tricky. Fortunately, the basis on which the step is made can be calculated. Paul Reed thoroughly explains how the transition should progress and offers some instructions on how to move properly through this phase.

Little Scrum Pigs and the Big, Bad Wolf

While continuing to grow, the state of agile adoption seems to be plucked straight out of an Ayn Rand novel, where the acceptance of mediocrity has infected the masses like a plague. Half-hearted adoptions have led to half-hearted results (as in "we suck less") that in turn are leaving these organizations straddling a tipping point from which they more often than not slide backwards, rather than making the push over the top to high performance and exponential growth in ROI.

Simple Strategies to Keep Quality Visible

In most projects, testers are the keepers of quality. Sharing the vision of quality with the entire team helps everyone involved in a project play a more active role in determining the state of quality in a product. In this week's column, Jeff Patton shares several innovative ideas he's seen in practice lately that have helped an entire team own up to the quality of its software.

Estimating Test Metrics

The goal of this paper is to discuss ways to create simple and Easy-to-use metrics to do better estimates. Estimates are important to test leads and test managers for a number of reasons. Here are some: 1) How many test cases do I need to write? 2) Can I use any of the existing test cases? 3) How many existing test cases do I need to modify? 4) How long will it take to execute the test cases? 5) How many resources do I need to write and execute the test cases?

Reaching the Peak of CMMI: How Fast Can You Climb?

Witness the incredible speed at which an international giant achieved the pinnacle of CMMI ratings...then learn how your organization can follow in its footsteps!