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All Valuable Products Are Risky to Build

Risks sound like disasters, but risks are neither bad nor good. They are only smart or stupid. Stupid risks are chances taken without significant gain if you succeed. Smart risks are ones that will pay off handsomely if you can overcome them. Smart risks are taken by folks who have knowingly made the decision to proceed in the face of risk.

Tim Lister's picture Tim Lister
Learning from Pathfinder's Bumpy Start

Steve March discusses problems experienced by the Mars Pathfinder. He imparts the following lessons: 1) design defensively in the face of complexity; 2) design defensively for post-shipment problems; and 3) beware of best cases.

Steve March
An Effective Technique for Verifying Software Design

While working at a telecommunications company, Linda Hamm had the task of developing and automating tests in a very short time with high-quality expectations. One of the projects was a rule-based expert system for switch maintenance. To help nail down the requirements, the group wrote state diagrams. This article is about what they are and how the group used them.

Linda Hamm
Automating Testing

Brian Marick gives a simplified history of test automation tools and provides a list of test automation links.

Brian Marick
Techniques for Recruiting and Retaining Testers

Are you challenged with having to hire people when your budget is limited, time constraints are tight, and the testing effort is overwhelming? Many of us have faced these situations. In this article, Jack Cook shares some techniques that have proven effective in recruiting and retaining testers.

Jack Cook
My Summer as a Hacker

Pete TerMaat shares some valuable lessons learned from a summer with "hacking legend" Richard Stallman. He learned that attitude, passion for one's work, was most important. Reviews, coding standards, porting guidelines, bug hunting advice, and other measures can fall flat without a passion for clean code, for "getting things right."

Pete TerMaat
A Look at McCabe IQ: Metrics Analysis and Code Coverage

Gedaliah Friedenberg encourages developers and development managers to use the McCabe IQ tool to enhance their development process and deliver better software to QA.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
The Bug You're Most Likely to Miss

We all miss some bugs, but the bug you're most likely to miss is one that gives wrong results that might look right. Let's look at a famous and costly example, then we'll see what we can do during testing to avoid a similar disaster.

Bob Stahl
Project Politics

Politics is often seen as a dirty business--but in the right hands it can be a way of bridging the gap between "I've got a great new project idea" and getting the right product into your customers' hands. Elizabeth Schmitz shares what she's learned about project politics.

Elizabeth Schmitz
Project Planning: It's in the Cards

Spend two days with an engineer named Eddie, and see how one skeptic learned the value of a low-tech, team-intensive, Cards-on-the-Wall planning technique.

Dwayne Phillips

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