Better Software Magazine Archive: May/June 2010

IN THIS ISSUE

Once Upon A Retrospective
By Jennitta Andrea

Children can teach us some extremely profound things--often when we least expect it. Jennitta Andrea shares sage advice about project retrospectives that she learned while perusing the well-known children's stories on her daughter's bookshelf. These insights will help improve the way you plan, facilitate, and participate in project retrospectives.

Believe the Territory
By Markus Gärtner

Test plans are seldom followed as written, project plans hardly ever fit the actual progress, and process models are rarely followed to the letter. Markus Gaertner examines why most of our documents become obsolete and gives advice about whether or not to continue to write and maintain them.
 

A Common Language
By Laura Brandenburg

Do your stakeholders use different terms to talk about the same concept or use the same term but in a different way? A domain model can clarify key concepts and the relationships between them, helping your team resolve ambiguous terms and leading to more productive discussions about project requirements.

Unintended Consequences
By Lee Copeland

Every action elicits a response, but sometimes that response is not what we expect. These anecdotes from industry experts are good examples of how our best intentions don't always match our plans.

The Weekend Testers
By Parimala Shankaraiah
Pradeep Soundararajan

This is the true story of freedom from the monotonous work of checking. It is the story of what happened when a few passionate testers took responsibility for their own education and fun in testing. Explore how they test, learn, and contribute to the open source.

Leveraging A Learning Culture
By Lisa Crispin

Mistakes happen. It's how you respond to them that matters. Teams might react to a bug with panic and blame, leading to a quickly hacked fix and possibly more issues. Taking time to investigate and learn leverages problems into process and practice improvement and a higher quality product.

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