Better Software Articles

Book Reviews for BAs

Get a head start on your New Year's resolution. Hone your business analysis skills or learn new ones, and make 2012 the highlight of your career.

10 Thoughts On Technical Debt

Many people realize that the technical debt spiral is a perverse incentive—it ends up rewarding behaviors we don't want and causing long-term pain. In this article, Matt Heusser moves beyond cliché to talk about how tech debt happens and what we can do about it.

When Software Smells Bad

Most software needs to be "maintainable" and have high "internal quality." But what does that mean in practical terms? Code smells form a vocabulary for discussing code quality and how well suited code might be to change. The smells also provide good indications as to what to refactor and how.

Ask To See His ...

Most managers would consider management far too complicated to script. But the five key components of management—planning, staffing, organizing, directing, and controlling—are practiced just as often in testing. So, let's see some of those management scripts.

Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System

Scaling Agile to the enterprise can be challenging once you start looking at the Program and Portfolio level. How do you design an effective coordination system that encourages collaboration, communication, transparency and is flexible, easy to implement and rapidly evolvable? We will explore key aspects of creating a simple but effective agile-ready coordination system for managing such initiatives, based upon the authors' observations and experiences across widely differing companies.

Imaginary Friends

We all want to satisfy our users, but tailoring software to customers is easier said than done. Personas—a method to synthesize your primary users into abstract entities—facilitates understanding of goals and experiences.

Testing Under Pressure

A cast-in-concrete delivery date looms on your project’s horizon. You have precious little time remaining, and the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of unstable code. Is this a "death march" project, or can the testing team actually do something useful, or perhaps even save the day?

Managing in Fluid Environments

Most management and change management methodologies assume a traditional environment—one in which the time between changes is much greater than the time required to adapt to each change. In fluid environments, the next change event happens before we can finish adapting to the last one, and sometimes even the one before that.

The Third Age Of Requirements

During the First Age of Requirements, programmers ruled the Earth. Today, programmers again lead the way but the possibilities for software development are unimaginable. You'd better be prepa

Works as Designed

How many times have you heard the phrase "works as designed" used to describe software that is flawed and in some cases not fit for use? While "works as designed" has become an acceptable response for some, for real professionals, it's not.