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Considering the Modern Technology Career The technical career ladder may be a quick climb, but what will you find at the top? Matthew Heusser looks at the lifespan, challenges, and opportunities of the modern tech career.
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Visualizing All the Work in Your Project Portfolio Regarding project portfolios, it can be a big problem for clients to see all the work. Some clients have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. Johanna Rothman describes some helpful ways to display the work being done.
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Think of the People First Johanna Rothman tackles the Paterno/Sandusky scandal and notes that the truth has a way of always coming out. Will you still have your integrity when the truth emerges?
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Simulation Games: A Way to Improve Communication in the Team One of the hardest daily tasks developers, QA, ScrumMasters, and product owners encounter is effective communication with others. Sound implausible? According to many articles, research, and personal observations, the main cause of project failure is not technology or hardware, but inefficient communication stemming from lack of effective communication between team members, incomplete business analysis, imprecise requirements, and vaguely formulated business objectives.
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Agile Coach Performance Management: Measure Yourself as a Coach, Not as a Manager The desire to control comes through loud and clear in the way most people’s worth is measured by their company’s performance management process. When it comes to performance review time, these controlling phrases crop up anew. Many successful agile coaches have been dismayed to learn that, despite the amazing results their teams produced and despite the new clarity and purpose that pervades the workplace, measuring their contributions still includes phrases such as “Herd the cats.”
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Par for the Course What can happen over a game of golf? You learn what you don't know, you learn more about what you do know, and you learn to listen to what others know. See how two managers and a caddy team up for some valuable lessons about staying out of the rough.
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Quality Metrics for Testers: Evaluating Our Products, Evaluting Ourselves As testers, we focus our efforts on measuring the quality of our organization's products. We count defects and list them by severity; we compute defect density; we examine the changes in those metrics over time for trends, and we chart customer satisfaction. While these are important, Lee Copeland suggests that to reach a higher level of testing maturity, we must apply similar measurements to ourselves. He suggests you count the number of defects in your own test cases and the length of time needed to find and fix them; compute test coverage-the measure of how much of the software you have actually exercised under test conditions-and determine Defect Removal Effectiveness-the ratio of the number of defects you actually found divided by the total number you should have found. These and other metrics will help you evaluate and then improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your testing process.
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Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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Learning from Experience: Software Testers Need More than Book Learning People often point to requirements documents and process manuals as ways to guide a new tester. Research into knowledge transfer, as described in The Social Life of Information, suggests that there is much more to the process of learning. Michael Bolton describes his own experiences on a new project, noting how the documentation helped ... and didn't.
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What's It Mean? ...Reducing Imprecision to Improve Verification Imprecise language makes understanding and, therefore, software verification more difficult. This article describes techniques for detecting and repairing vague and ambiguous software requirements.
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Go, Team! Fed up with good-ol'-boy salesmen, a manufacturing mindset, and just-get-it-out-the-door directions? A little assertiveness, a few ounces of patience, a dash of charm, a lot of leadership, and some attitude adjustment by everyone might help. Read how one manager made the world a better place to work one small victory at a time.
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