Articles

An Uncomfortable Truth about Agile Testing

One characteristic of agile development is continuous involvement from testers throughout the process. Testers have a hard and busy job. Jeff has finally starting to understand why testing in agile development is fundamentally different.

Questions You Should Ask

It's a technique children and teenagers have mastered: asking "why" until they get to an acceptable response (or until we're too tired to continue answering). In this week's column, find out how Michele Sliger uses a similar approach designed by Six Sigma to drill down into the underlying cause of any problem within software projects. She then continues the inquisition with a series of other questions in order to find out how these problems affect business value and technology. Read on to learn what these questions are and how you can start using them to find out why things aren't going as planned.

sqaMethods Approach to Measuring Software Quality

Measuring software quality is one of the areas where if you can implement it properly, you can be the hero in your company. Very few companies can tell you with a real degree of certainty how good their software is. However, the old question remains "How do I measure quality in my software?" In this paper, I will discuss a method that utilizes your company's existing infrastructure to generate a software quality index.

Is Collaboration the Right Way to Work?

Do you manage a team or a group? How can you tell the difference, and is it important to differentiate the two? In this week's column, Esther Derby explains that identifying your associates as one or the other is paramount to how they should be managed.

Pack Up Your Troubles

Who likes working on troubled projects? Fiona Charles does. In this week's column, find out why Fiona sometimes seeks out such projects and how she maintains the right frame of mind to allow her to solve problems creatively and devise tactical solutions to project issues. More importantly, you, too, can learn how to enjoy troubled projects and develop your project skills.

Multi-user, Multi-process Test Automation

There is a saying about how to make software: First you make it work; then you make it good; then you make it fast. If you have working test automation, and if your test automation is finding bugs, then the next step is to make your tests run fast. This article talks about handling two things you will need to address to make that happen: users and processes.

The Agile Project Management Office (Agile PMO)

Traditional program management offices (PMOs) are responsible for providing checks and balances to the development and IT organizations regarding budget and schedule. Oversight and management that comes from the PMO drives certain behaviors in the project managers and, therefore, in the project staff. Similarly, the Agile PMO provides certain checks and balance, but principally focuses on the holistic well-being of the project.

Using Evaluation Frameworks for Quick Reflections

Are we Agile? If we ask a leader we'll get one perspective, but if we ask each person on the team we may be surprised by the variety of answers. Since 2002, IBM has used agile evaluation frameworks with dozens of teams to help them learn, improve, and share their experiences with agile practices. The metrics in the Extreme Programming Evaluation Framework, or (XP:EF) originally focused on XP, and similar instances covered other methods.[i] But because the framework can be used with a broader set of practices, it's simpler to say "the Agile Evaluation Framework" (Agile:EF). This article shares tips on using the framework in a lightweight manner to leverage "the simplest metrics that could possibly work."

Adopting Agile

Without a universal definition of agile, it can be difficult to separate those who are truly practicing agile, and those who have it wrong. While agile has grown immensely popular over the years, there are still some who have yet to convert. We took a look at each of these groups.

Heurists of the World Unite! Merging Agile Methods in Software and Interaction Design

Software development is seen as chronically chaotic and complex to the extent that project management can achieve little control over projects or outcome [1, 2]. Recently, we have come into a new era of hope; hope of getting people - real people, users, both naïve and sophisticated - more involved with, more relevant to, and more visible in software development.