Better Software Articles

Business Analysis Career Paths

Five or ten years ago, the common career advice to business analysts was that to be promoted, you should become a project manager. Today, business analysis professionals have myriad career options.

Documenting Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing projects can have documentation requirements, just like any other project. Jonathan describes various ways we can create documentation on our exploratory testing projects, including guidance documents, test-coverage reports, and video software to help create lightweight, powerful documentation.

Agile Planning And Analysis: Synergizing To Deliver Value

Are your planning and analysis activities synergistic? Is their total effect on your project greater than the sum of the two activities? When done hand in glove you’ll see how planning and analysis can help groom your backlog and enable you to continuously deliver valuable software.

Make Your Tele-team Work

Can software development teams that include one or more telecommuters work as effectively as collocated teams? Learn how to overcome common obstacles faced by "tele-teams," illustrated with real-life examples.

Deliver Applications that Meet Business Needs

A common mistake made when building applications to meet business needs is not properly defining business requirements from the get-go. Poorly defined requirements compromise the quality of applications and lead to projects that deliver marginal value or fail outright.

How The Cloud Changes Software Production

Creating services in the cloud enables new capabilities and features to improve your product and empower your team. But the cloud also introduces challenges as to how to build and test such services. This introduction to the cloud shows how you can leverage this powerful technology and addresses how the cloud affects software development, testing, and the team.

Increase Quality With Table-Driven Acceptance Tests

Vague or ambiguous requirements can cause loops in development processes. Creating requirements that include acceptance tests cuts down on the looping and increases the flow of working software to the customer.

Learning For Agile Testers, Part 1

What makes testers successful on agile teams? What skills do agile testers need to enjoy an exciting career and how can they learn those skills? In part one of our "Learning for Agile Testers" series, we explain what a well-rounded agile tester ought to know–and it goes way beyond technical skills!

Filling The Blank Page

Having trouble starting projects, understanding scope and business processes, or with estimation? Mark shares some tips and techniques to avoid common business analysis pain points at the early part of a new project assignment.

Action Based Testing

For many organizations, automation is a burden--even with good tools. Keywords are popular but don't suffice on their own. Action based testing places a high emphasis on modularized test design, not only making tests lean and mean but also allowing for very stable and maintainable automation.