The Latest

A variety of agile software development methods and practices have now been around for a solid ten years and existed for at least another ten years prior. Configuration management (CM) for agile development has now been discussed since the turn of the century. So what are the core principles of CM and how can CM help agile teams?

Math is often not easy to learn, even for those of us who enjoy it. And if you don't use your mathematical knowledge, you just might forget how to use it. Danny Faught likes math and has found ways of using basic math like algebra, the modulo function, expected values, and logarithms in testing. It's kept his mind fresh on mathematical concepts and formulas, and he hopes it will do the same for you. In this week's column, he explains how to use math to improve testing.

Exploratory testing—questioning and learning about the product as you design and execute tests rather than slavishly following predefined scripts—makes sense for many projects. But does it make sense for agile projects? In this column, Johanna Rothman examines how exploratory testing might work on an agile project.

Because tests are commonly viewed in terms of offering quantitative feedback on the presence or absence of defects in specific situations, Good Unit Tests need to both illustrate and define the behavioral contract of the unit in question. Do you have GUTs?

What if you had a picnic and no one brought potato salad? Find out what picnic planning and steam engines have to do with project success and not just satisfying your customers but delighting them.

Is it really so hard to produce software that works? When was the last time you read a software license agreement? Most are one-sided statements that limit the product developer's liability. It's time to move away from "Use at your own risk" software and be upfront with customers about the true cost of quality.

The Gang of Four's design patterns have a special place in many programmers' hearts. But it's time to look beyond the GoF twenty-three and realize they aren't the only patterns in the universe.