development lifecycles

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
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
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 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
A Study in Failures

Examples of mistakes, manifestations, and problems help us understand all parts of the software. Brian Marick suggests Web resources that examine software failures.

Brian Marick
The Two Bugs

Brian Marick applies the philosophical concept of "ready-to-hand" to software programming and describes two bugs that illustrate problems caused by mismatched reuse of ideas.

Brian Marick
Measuring Up

You measure because you want to make better-informed decisions. But even simple, harmless-looking measures can be dangerous. For example, they can give you a nice, clear picture of an illusion. Do you want to base your decisions on illusions? Technical Editor Brian Lawrence advises that, before you dive into measuring anything, ask yourself, "Will measuring do more harm than good?"

Brian Lawrence

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