Better Software Articles

How to Fail with Agile

A switch to agile often conflicts with personal career goals such as maintaining the status quo and working no harder than necessary. These twenty guidelines will help you sabotage your agile project, helping you fail quickly and spectacularly.

How to Fail Less and Enjoy More

The shiniest software application in the world, shipped on time and under budget, is a failure if it doesn't make someone's job easier. Failures cost us customers and money. How can we design software that our customers want to use and that will reduce our cost of failure?

Advice for the New Leader

As a new manager it's easy to fall into the trap of taking on more of your team's responsibilities than you should. Learn how to guide your team to success by stepping back and letting team members solve their own problems, learn from their mistakes, and most of all do what you hired them to do.

The Mission Is the Message

A mission statement is supposed to guide and inspire the members of an organization as well as define the organization's purpose, the business it is in, and its responsibilities to its clients. Is your statement sending the right message?

Stop The Insanity! Using Root Cause Analysis to Avoid Repeating Your Mistakes

We've all heard Einstein's definition of insanity, and it definitely holds true in software development. We "are" going to make mistakes in product development, but root-cause analysis can help us understand those mistakes and be proactive in not repeating them.

The Myth Of Risk Management

Risk management is an illusion. We must recognize that software projects are inherently risky and admit to ourselves that it's not the known problems that are going to cause our projects to fail. It's the risks that are unmentionable, uncontrollable, unquantifiable, or unknown that make projects crash and burn.

Agile Model-Driven Development

Despite what you might have heard, modeling is an important part of agile software development. Find out how agile model-driven development fits into the overall agile development lifecycle in a lean and streamlined manner and can improve productivity on your team.

A ''D'' in Programming, Part 2

In his final pitch for the D programming language, Chuck brings to "closure" (pun intended) a running example from previous Code Craft articles while exploring some powerful features of the D language.

Know Where Your Wheels Are

Drawing from his experiences while learning to drive, Michael applies lessons he learned from written rules, experiential learning, and the advice of mentors to teaching new testers some valuable skills.

When to Step Up, When to Step Back

Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don't want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? Pollyanna Pixton focuses on collaboration as the key and teaches you how and when to step back and unleash the hidden talent in your organization and teams. Learn how to create an open environment that fosters innovation and creativity and how to let your team members take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Equally important, develop the techniques to step up and lead to keep the project on track without impeding the flow of ideas. Come away with tools to both motivate and guide teams and organizations effectively—and learn to master the balancing act of leadership.