If you find an article grating on you, if you think the author is clearly wrong-headed, I suggest you read it differently than you probably read most articles. Explicitly separate what the author implies you should believe from the actions she describes. Focus on her specific results and the actions that led to them. How, in your style of work could you adapt the author's actions to get your results? In this edition of Technically Speaking, Brian Marick explores this possibilty.

Metrics are only worthwhile if you review and use them. Do your quality reports go directly from the inbox to the trash can? A quality metrics program can be a great asset to your organization. Engineering, sales, and the company overall can benefit from having such a program. This article will help you explore ways to make measurements meaningful outside of QA.

Believing that a technique is a well-defined thing can hamper you if you're not careful. It encourages you to react to problems in just one way: try ever harder to do the technique right. It turns off the "situated" part of situated reasoning. Brian Marick shows how the "shopping cart delusion," or strictly adhering to definitions, keeps you from breaking the rules to your benefit.

A witch hunt is the search for whoever let those darned bugs out into the field. How do you stop a witch hunt? The best way is to refocus attention from "someone to blame" to "something to fix." If you focus on what in the process is causing the defects and discuss how to minimize or even eliminate the causes, you have a real chance to turn things around.