Articles

Pivot, Pilot, and Adapt

Anupam Kundu and Maneesh Subherwal explain how to operate in a global, hyper-competitive world while avoiding risk-laden experiments and other "stupid" strategies.

Management Myth #4: I Don't Need One-on-Ones

One-on-ones aren’t for status reports. They aren’t just for knowing all the projects. They are for feedback and coaching, and meta-feedback and meta-coaching, and for fine-tuning the organization. If you are a manager and you aren’t using one-on-ones, you are not using the most important management tool you have.

Wherever You Go: Testing Mobile Applications, Part 2

In part 2 of this interview, Jonathan Kohl discusses testing location-based services, the value of a good social network for crowdsourcing, and how poor optimization practices might literally burn a hole in your pocket.

Good Architecture, Good Leadership

Software architects have the unique ability to provide leadership using skills gained in this role. Drawing on Kouzes and Posner's The Leadership Challenge, Patrick Bailey examines five practices that can be leveraged by the aspiring architect-as-leader.

Outside-the-Box Thinking? Maybe Not.

With so much focus on thinking outside the box, many of us often forget that simply thinking inside the box will give us the answers we need. If you're having difficulty completing projects on time, you may just need to use the skills you already have inside, rather than what lies outside.

Embracing Change and Complexity

Louis J. Taborda explains that in order to be successful, we need to be able to embrace both change and complexity while being agile. The more quickly we develop software and the greater the sophistication of the solutions we build, the more difficult it is to maintain agility.

How Technical Support Is Like a Pain in the Neck

Payson Hall looks closely at the unique idea of not just providing better service to clients, but changing the client's perception of what defines good or bad service. We've gotten so used to "normal" that we've lost the ability to appreciate it. But this can be changed.

Bare Minimum Internationalization

Internationalization isn’t only about dealing with other nationalities and languages. It’s about creating software for a multicultural world. Even if the software you’re testing won’t be translated entirely into another language, it still should meet some basic requirements for international visitors.

The Next Generation: CM for Small Teams

Software configuration management (CM) can be a daunting venture for a small team. It seems that many solutions require a lot of effort and money, but this is not always the case. This article looks at what a small team really needs for CM.

Goal, Goal, Who's Got the Goal?

Don Gray explains why software development teams need three common goals: long term, mid term, and short term. These goals focus a team and provide the glue that holds the team together.