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Tinkerable Software

In what ways should software be like a house? In a recent issue of STQE magazine, Technical Editor Brian Marick’s musings about the concept of “tinkerable software” generated some interesting discussion about the very nature of software design. This week’s column runs a portion of that piece so that our Sticky-minded readers can sink their thoughts into the concept.

Brian Marick
Telling It Like It Is: Test Status Reports as Tools for Change

Producing regular test status reports makes your progress—and problems—visible to those outside your group. Here's how spending a couple of hours a week on gathering and reporting results can be crucial to your software development team's success.

Pete TerMaat
Use Cases, Ten Years Later

Use cases have experienced a long and sometimes rocky history. Look back on the evolution of use cases to better understand how to use them today.

Alistair Cockburn's picture Alistair Cockburn
Release Criteria: Is This Software Done?

For any project, the big question is: "Is this software ready to release yet?" Explore how to answer that question with confidence, by learning how to define success and how to gain consensus on release criteria.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Karl Wiegers on Humanizing Peer Reviews

How serious are you about the quality of your work? Learn how to set aside egos and start benefiting from the experience and perspective of your colleagues.
 

Karl E. Wiegers
A Lesson in Scripting: Improve Your Testing with Programming Skills

You can write simple programs to help with your daily testing tasks using Perl or other scripting languages. Here's a primer on scripting languages and programming skills for testers.

Danny R. Faught's picture Danny R. Faught
Becoming Indispensable

How can you achieve the lofty status of being an "indispensable" employee? Elisabeth Hendrickson shares some valuable tips, including how to adjust your attitude, where to invest your time, and how to communicate better.

Elisabeth Hendrickson's picture Elisabeth Hendrickson
A Look at the Ruby Scripting Language

The Ruby language has gained many followers recently. Ruby offers many of the same features that made Perl a popular scripting language, but also has the advantage of being a fully object-oriented language. While developing an object-oriented application in Perl might be a bit clumsy, Ruby supports object-oriented programming quite naturally. This can offer many advantages when developing a large testing application.

Phil Tomson
Small Change, Big Trouble

Ross Collard researches the cause of coding errors, and recommends some process improvements companies should implement, including establishing the minimum amount of regression testing required for new releases.

Ross Collard's picture Ross Collard
Don't Use Bug Counts to Measure Testers

Cem Kaner tells us why we should not use bug counts to measure testers. Using examples, he illustrates two problems: 1) bug counts are poor measures of individual performance; and 2) the side effects of using bug counts as a measure are serious.

Cem Kaner

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