Better Software Magazine

Better Software Magazine Articles

The Roles of the Project Management Office in Scrum

Successfully adopting Scrum entails understanding and perhaps adjusting the role of the project management office (PMO), whose workers are often resistant to the lighter-weight process. But, they can become a critical part of agile success. Discover how an agile PMO works.

Mike Cohn's picture Mike Cohn
License to Open Source

Open source is widespread and growing in many software development organizations. While there's no purchase cost, the code does come with license obligations. Understanding open source from an intellectual property perspective can help avoid downstream legal.

Kamal Hassin
Simplify Your Combinatorial Testing

Combinatorial testing is effective for testing multiple, non-sequential inputs that affect a common output in complex software. But, it's easy to misapply it or become a slave to the output. Learn to overcome limitations and benefit fully from this technique.

Bj Rollison's picture Bj Rollison
Us Against Them

How well does creating an opposing force serve to deliver on shared objectives within the same organization? A stronger argument may be to teach both business stakeholders and delivery personnel to reach across organizational boundaries to share not only the vision but also the methods used to achieve it.

Doug Goldberg's picture Doug Goldberg
Broken Windows, Broken Projects

A social experiment in the ‘80s found “Vandalism can occur anywhere once communal barriers are lowered by actions that seem to signal that 'no one cares.'" The same can be said for our software projects.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
The System Behind The Behavior

Most managers are familiar with using feedback and coaching to help people improve their performance at work. But those aren't the only tools managers have. Sometimes, the most effective way to change individual behavior is to change something in the system.

Esther Derby's picture Esther Derby
Slicing Requirements for Agile Success

Agile teams need to analyze product requirements in enough detail to build, test, and deliver the right requirements in short time frames. For the many teams that struggle to define "just enough, just in time” requirements, here's help.

Four Paths To Predictable, Repeatable, Reusable Test Data

Modern applications operate in highly integrated environments, and critical systems rely on massive amounts of data that likely contain sensitive information. Discover useful strategies for preparing your baseline, handling interfaces, designing input data, and planning for output results.

Linda Hayes's picture Linda Hayes
Believe the Territory

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.
 

Markus Gärtner's picture Markus Gärtner
A Common Language

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.

Laura Brandenburg's picture Laura Brandenburg

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