Articles

Is there any value to positive testing? Some experts say No! I think there is--and here's why...

Tasks and processes often have hidden costs ("friction") that escape our notice. Learning to recognize and reduce needless friction can make a big difference on project cost and schedule, as well as team morale.

A Word with the Wise: Expanding Testing Horizons

In this Sticky ToolLook interview, Danny Faught shares insight onto his earliest days as a tester, the skills he's acquired throughout his career, and skills and tools he believes every tester should posses.

Making Retrospective Changes Stick

Retrospectives become a waste of time if the changes and improvements agreed upon in the meeting are never accomplished. Esther Derby believes in the power of retrospectives. And she knows firsthand that it's easy to talk about a change, but not always easy to actually do something differently. In this week's column, Esther shares experiences that illustrate this point and offers advice on how to make changes stick.

CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Build Management

The very first generation of CM tools dealt with support for build operations. Typically, this was through the inclusion of a facility such as a Make utility, and perhaps some tools to help build Make files. But as we move into the next generation of CM tools, it is also more important to be able to manage the builds at an information level. Build Management moves from the earlier build operation support and tagging functions, to wider traceability and better information accessibility. And beyond the build operations themselves, there are additional benefits as we move into the next generation of Deployment Management.

Think Like a Tester

After more than thirty years in information technology, the last fourteen spent focused on testing and quality assurance, Dale Perry has come to believe everyone can benefit from thinking like a tester. In this article, Dale offers comical, yet serious, insight on how a tester views airport bathroom stall designs.

Design of Database Security Policy for Enterprise Systems

Data integrity means the product or the service should secure the customer data and processes against unauthorized access. Secondly, it also should comply to local government regulations and any geographic or cultural laws. Thus, along with functional features, its ability to secure the data and the processes of the customer becomes the key elements it must contain for it to be accepted in the global market.

Warm and Fuzzy

Automated tools are essential to software development. Tools can take the drudgery out of the more tedious development and testing tasks and let us get back to what we love: writing code (or in the tester's case, breaking code). This is especially true for security testing where the goal is not to prove that the software does what it is supposed to do, but rather that it doesn't do what it's not supposed to do. This is a much more difficult task--if not actually an impossible task--but, thankfully, we have some great tools to help us out. In this week's column, Bryan Sullivan covers one of the most valuable of these tools: the fuzzer.

From The Editor

I wish there was a book entitled "How to Write Your First Letter as an Editor", unfortunately there is none that I am aware of, so please bear with me. As the new Editor-in-Chief of the Agile Journal, I would like to introduce myself and tell you a little about where we will be going with the Agile Journal over the next few months.

Top 9 Challenges of Adopting Scrum: Product Owners, By the Book, and Organizational Issues

Introducing Scrum can be fun, but can also be quite a challenge. There are numerous hurdles to overcome, new practices to master and problems to solve. In this article, we will present some of the mistakes we have seen made, or made ourselves when introducing Scrum at various companies. In this second article, we'll discuss Scrum product owners, Scrum by the book, and organizational issues.