Articles

Role of Management in an Iterative and Agile Software Development Environment

This article discusses the role of management within iterative and agile software development and project management. The author shares his personal experience as a software engineer who started out in the traditional way of software development, and along the way discovered a much better way—iterative and agile software development and iterative and agile project management.

A Tool and Case Study to Evaluate a Tester

When we talk about the measuring performance of something, we usually compare it with existing benchmarks or define and set expectations. This paper discusses both these methods and touches upon motivation being an important aid in making the evaluation easier.

Software Testing: A Profession of Paradoxes?

Our already fairly regulated "profession" seems to harbor some remarkable irregularities that lie implied in its very nature. Several paradoxes and catch-22s can be found throughout different domains of software testing. The affected areas: test execution, usability testing, test report data, test team, test organization, test automation. With this paper I aim to give an overview of the testing paradoxes that challenge us all--and give the reader some food for thought in the process.

Testing COTS: When, How, and How Much?

Testing processes and practices are well defined and generally understood for internally developed applications, but what about those that are licensed from third parties? Granted, the vendor has responsibility for testing its own products, but the possibility of the software failing still exists and can be costly, even devastating; blaming others offers little consolation. If you rely on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application, where does your trust in the vendor end?

Knocking Down Silos: Transitioning the Enterprise to Agile

In this article, the structure of the misaligned IT organization is revealed as process-centric silos which have created an ever-widening chasm with business clients that the enterprise organization is supposed to serve.

Agile Conversations

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.

Electric Cloud Reaps Rewards of Continuous Integration and Developer Builds

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.

Experiences in Release Planning: Two Days in the Life of an Agile Newbie

Hello, my name is Maurice Sare. (my friends call me Mo). I am a first level tech lead/engineering manager at Gameonics, Inc, a multinational developer of distributed gaming for PCs and now, it seems, "smart phones." I've only been here a few weeks. Before that, I worked for a company that developed operating systems for smart phones, so I know something about the domain, but I've never worked at the applications layer, before. Before this, I hadn't had any formal training in agile development practices.

Well-Formed Teams and Agile: An Opportunity to Thrive

Well-formed agile teams can thrive in a direction ideally set by business vision. Unfortunately, many teams are forced into survival by organizations that push work through the team matrix, forcing teams to establish themselves as dependencies. The purpose of this article is to firmly establish the notion of well-formed teams so that guidance patterns for their creation can help organizations to "thrive" instead of "survive."

How to Achieve Traceability without a Test Management Tool

This article talks about achieving traceability by using unique identifier fields to link various deliverables like scenarios, test cases, etc.