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After reading the book The Day the Phones Stopped, which was published in 1991, Lee began wondering why the poor software quality and complaints about development and testing documented in this book are the same complaints we hear today.

We don't always appreciate the power of taking a moment to reflect on past performance. Find out how real change can happen when a team invests in time together.

Development teams often are unaware of the commercial impacts of the software improvements they deliver. Often, the prioritization of work is done based on technical, rather than commercial, considerations. Based on a real-world example, this story explores the commercial benefits enabled by delivering in short release cycles and prioritizing according to bottom-line benefits.

Black Swans, in the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are improbable and unexpected events with a severe impact. One of the most important goals of testing is to find problems in the product. What can testers do to help reduce the likelihood that we'll encounter a Black Swan?

A handful of years ago, some of my clients began to ask me, “How are we doing?” My replies were always something like, “You’re doing pretty well at pair programming, and I like how teams have shifted from writing requirements documents to talking about user stories. But teams really haven’t embraced the idea of automated testing yet, and that’s where we need to focus most.” But this wasn’t the type of answer they wanted; they wanted to know, “How are we doing compared to our competition?”

Early in 2004, Chris Shinkle's company began adopting agile practices. Unfortunately, agile did not have the desired cultural impact within their organization-and the adoption floundered.