Better Software Magazine Articles
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Learning from Experience: Software Testers Need More than Book Learning People often point to requirements documents and process manuals as ways to guide a new tester. Research into knowledge transfer, as described in The Social Life of Information, suggests that there is much more to the process of learning. Michael Bolton describes his own experiences on a new project, noting how the documentation helped ... and didn't. |
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The Missing Measurement In these times, many of us are being told to "do more with less." A more useful approach is "invest our organization's scarce resources where the return is the greatest." To do so, we must define the financial benefits sought when developing a system in addition to its requirements. |
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Metrics that Motivate To implement a meaningful incentive system for your team, you need to select metrics that encourage the behaviors you need and the results you want. But first you have to decide what you need and want. |
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Stop The Insanity! Using Root Cause Analysis to Avoid Repeating Your Mistakes We've all heard Einstein's definition of insanity, and it definitely holds true in software development. We "are" going to make mistakes in product development, but root-cause analysis can help us understand those mistakes and be proactive in not repeating them. |
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Where Do I Go From Here?—Professional Growth for Software Testers Most professionals have a detailed career ladder upon which to climb and grow their careers. But in many test organizations that ladder has only one rung—and it leads to management. If management isn't your path of choice, these tips can help you market yourself and add value to your career while you build your own technical career ladder. |
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The Hawthorne Effect Ever wondered what productivity experiments on factory workers in the early twentieth century have in common with today's adoption of agile practices? Lee sheds some light on the "process of process" and the importance of retrospectives as catalysts for change. |
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What's on Your Dashboard? Just because a metric is easy to capture doesn't mean it is useful. The metrics that are really needed are the ones that can help you make good decisions. Find out how to establish a project dashboard with meaningful metrics that will guide your project safely to its destination without getting bogged down in an endless pursuit of unnecessary information. |
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Metrics You Can Bet On An old adage says that you cannot manage what you cannot measure, but Mike Cohn thinks differently. Here, he offers suggestions on when to use metrics and when you can manage without, as well as some guidelines to help you choose your metrics carefully. |
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Debunking Myths of Agile Development Agile methods have made their way to the software mainstream in the last few years. As more organizations turn to agile development, its definition often gets obscured. Learn the facts behind five common agile myths, as Robert Holler attempts to dispel these misconceptions. |
Robert Holler
July 5, 2006 |
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Metrics Motivation Typical metrics are used to predict an outcome by comparing plans to actual results. They are objective and don't influence what you are trying to measure. Biased metrics, on the other hand, are a valuable tool for deliberately altering behavior to improve the performance of a group. Find out how biased metrics can be used on your projects to pinpoint problems in specific areas and to influence people to fix them. |
Jan Scott
December 29, 2005 |
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