Better Software Magazine

Better Software Magazine Articles

A Look at Network Testing with NIST Net

Gene Sally looks at network testing with NIST Net. He concludes that NIST Net is a powerful tool, allowing you to emulate network conditions seldom occurring in your lab but nonetheless prevalent in the real world. You can reproduce the conditions in which your application fails, easing diagnosis and repair.

Gene Sally
One Size Does Not Fit All

For all of the effort we've made in the software field to find the best methodology, the best programming language, the best operating system, the best set of tools, even the best process maturity model—the search for the "best" is often futile. Robert L. Glass urges you to not be confined by a software approach that doesn't match your specific needs.

Robert L. Glass
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
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
A Race with Only Losers

Collectively, problems related to resource sharing in multi-threaded, multi-processor, and distributed systems are termed "concurrency problems." Concurrency problems are further divided into several major subcategories such as deadlock, livelock, priority inversion, starvation, and race conditions. This article will focus on race conditions.

Dave Cline
Time Management and the Art of Software

Tried and true techniques for getting a grip on priorities and schedules can mean the difference between breaking your neck to get a passable software product out the door and emerging from a project with a quality product and a sane staff. Alyn Wambeke relays some software-specific time management suggestions.

Alyn Wambeke
A Look at TeamTrack 3.0, a Web-Based Defect Tracking Tool

George Hamblen and Stephen Bailey look at TeamShare's TeamTrack 3.0, a Web-based defect tracking tool. TeamTrack offers a fully functional defect tracking system over a company intranet. Since all of the functionality is offered from the server, this means each desktop needs only a browser to access the system.

Not a Game of Random() Chance

Online gaming poses a myriad of security risks. These hazards include various forms of player cheating and the possibility of unfair gaming software, in addition to the risks normally associated with any e-commerce business. Matthew Schmid describes a specific design flaw in an online poker game.

Matthew Schmid
Automating Testing

Brian Marick gives a simplified history of test automation tools and provides a list of test automation links.

Brian Marick
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

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