After a conversation with a stranger about the abuses of process in an industry that features spaceships, technology, and an oddball rebellion against a controlling empire—no, nothing to do with Hollywood—Matthew Heusser ponders a simple dose of process improvement.

What do you do when assigned the role of project customer, with a team that has never worked with a customer, building an application that was barely thought out? Sound like a nightmare? It doesn't have to be. Find out how one project manager beat the odds to produce a high-quality, on-time release.

What does dental floss have to do with automated functional testing? More than you might think. Learn from one Agile practitioner how you can apply the tenets of good oral hygiene to your functional tests for requirements artifacts so effective they'll make you smile.

Grandma cooked her roast a certain way, and now you're repeating the process without knowing why you have to trim the ends off an uncooked roast even though the pan is adequately sized. Relic processes in many organzations fall trap to this mindset since the reason behind the action lost its meaning long ago. Lee Copeland calls these "IF ..., THEN ..." processes. When the organization loses sight of the IF responsible for the action, then you're left with what Lee describes as "a process without a context; a rule without a reason."