Process

Better Software Magazine Articles

FitNesse: Automated Specification

Micah Martin introduces the open source tool FitNesse.

Micah Martin
Usability and Privacy

While most bugs that make headline news are due to careless software implementations exploited by skilled hackers, the problems in KaZaA center around its user interface. This article details KaZaA's application flaws and then suggests ways to prevent such flaws.

Nathaniel Good
Adopting XP

Extreme Programming (XP) takes practices that are known to be good and combines and applies them in a revolutionary way. Before you turn your team on to XP, check out the steps to take, and pitfalls to avoid, to make your project an "Xtreme" success.

C. Keith Ray
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
Introducing Test-First Development

Testers are often frustrated to receive a product for testing that is riddled with bugs. They want to know why some of the bugs couldn't have been caught during development. If only some tests could be run before the code was handed off! Jason Bedunah learned the benefits of test-first development first hand. Here, he introduces a framework for testing and coding that he found to be very helpful, and he gives some pointers on getting developers on board with test-first development.

Jason L. Bedunah
A Look at Cost Xpert

John Magill found Marotz's Cost Xpert 2.0 to meet his requirements, offer some important relevant program factors, and permit him to change or adjust the factors to establish an estimating window or boundaries, all at a competitive price.

John Magill
Faults of Omission

Brian Marick is obsessed with faults of omission in software code, and he thinks you should be too. In this Bug Report, Marick describes coding omissions, design omissions, and requirements omissions, and offers some ways to prevent (or at least test) them.

Brian Marick
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 e-Test Suite 301 by RSW

RSW Software’s e-Test Suite contains four main components. The reusable scripts recorded with RSW e-Tester (the functional testing tool) feed RSW e-Load (the performance and stress-testing tool). For reporting and analysis purposes, results gathered during performance testing feed to RSW e-Reporter. The final tool, RSW e-Monitor, is responsible for monitoring the status of Websites by sending periodic page requests and validating them against previously recorded results.

Christopher Nolan
Learning to Love Unit Testing

Unit testing can become a developer's best friend. Find out how and why from two programmers who now rely on this practice to improve development.

Andy Hunt Dave Thomas

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