Visit any bookstore these days, and you will be faced with shelves of books whose titles claim they can make everything—from cooking to exercise—more interesting. In our industry, boredom is a problem that can affect your ability to solve complex technical problems. Discover how change can spice up your software processes.

Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?"

When these information architects were assigned to a team that was struggling to achieve CMMI Level 2, they found little user buy-in for the new processes. Find out how introducing user-centered design to the project got everyone involved in the design process and increased the users' satisfaction in the end product.

While "testing" is part of its name, many TDD pundits insist TDD is not a testing technique, but rather a technique that helps to focus one's design thinking. Drawing on real events from the authors' combined experience, this story follows a fictional team as it encounters some of the pitfalls of using test-driven development.