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Product Owners Should Care About Quality Product owners often view quality as an ugly duckling—necessary to ship software, but nerdy and a drag. Instead, they should be guardians of quality. Only when quality meets functionality is lasting value created.
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Selling To Your Buyer No matter how well you've built it, no users will benefit from your product unless you can convince the buyers to purchase it. Selling to buyers is different than satisfying users—and you have to do both well to succeed. Consider the needs of the buyer as stakeholder. When you have no buyers, you have no users.
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Working Together—Not Just Working Together People collaborate—and don't—in a variety of ways. Johanna Rothman examines what happens when collaboration isn't working, and how to make it work. Watch for several barriers to collaboration including those imposed on people by the organization itself.
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QA Is Not Evil A software tester re-examines the role of software testers in quality assurance work, helping implement software development processes. If testers are knowledgeable, helpful, and supportive, they may be in the best possible position to help the team improve its software development process.
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The State of the Practice While software testing focuses on detection rather than prevention, we can argue that it has become a powerful counter-offensive against bugs. We can equally argue that many of today's software practices impede quality. Ross Collard compares these two positions and invites you to join the discussion.
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The TSA and Software Quality As evidenced by news stories relating blatant failures on the part of the Transportation Security Administration, many organizations fail to learn much from the information testing provides. What can we do to improve the quality of our measurements so we can learn valuable lessons from the results?
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Keep Non-developers in the Loop Keeping QA members up to date on changes as they happen–through meetings, wikis, and email–can reduce the number of unnecessary bug reports and save you time and frustration.
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Software: Use at Your Own Risk Is it really so hard to produce software that works? When was the last time you read a software license agreement? Most are one-sided statements that limit the product developer's liability. It's time to move away from "Use at your own risk" software and be upfront with customers about the true cost of quality.
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Software Quality and the Prisoner's Dilemma This industry spin on the classical dilemma illustrates the games we play when software quality is at stake and gives insight into why software managers who forego quality in order to reach a short-term marketing advantage are actually acting rationally.
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What's In a Word? 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?"
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