Articles
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Measuring the Performance of Your Operations Center Many organizations have problems with consistently tracking and measuring system outages. Issues aren't logged, admins make changes to systems without going through change management, and a high number of issues turn out to be recurring problems. Implementing a performance measurement process calculates system reliability and can help you improve consistency. |
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6 Steps to a Successful DevOps Adoption Implementing DevOps practices can significantly accelerate software releases while still assuring applications meet quality objectives. But DevOps can’t be bought, bolted on, or just declared. If you’re considering a move to a DevOps delivery model, here are six approaches for ensuring a successful DevOps adoption within an organization. |
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The Risks of Measuring Technical Debt If your organization measures technical debt, have you really considered why you're doing this, and what you will do with that information once it has been gathered? Just because you can measure technical debt doesn't mean you should. Before you start (or continue) measuring technical debt, it's important to recognize that there are consequences. |
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Visualize Your Problems to Manage Good Solutions Visualizing your workflow is a key component of agile methods. But if we want to solve problems, we have to do a bit more than just visualize them with sticky notes. We have to perform some actual problem management. And to manage problems, a good start would be to measure them. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Building Highly Productive Teams Using a Commitment-to-Progress Ratio: Work Committed vs. Done This article explains methods to build a team that will embrace "required work" and deliver robust software in a predictable fashion. It proposes a measure that helps calculate the throughput of an agile team by comparing work committed to work actually done. |
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Measure the Measurable: Improving Software Quality Through Telemetry Observing customers in a usability lab can be invaluable for improving product design. But, once your software leaves the lab, do you know what your customers are actually doing and whether or not your software meets their expectations? Learn how engineers on the Microsoft Office team apply a variety of software telemetry techniques to understand real-world usage, how the results drive product improvements, and how you can apply similar techniques. |
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Issues about Metrics about Bugs Managers often use metrics to help make decisions about the state of the product or the quality of the work done by the test group. Yet, measurements derived from bug counts can be highly misleading because a "bug" isn't a tangible, countable thing; it's a label for some aspect of some relationship between some person and some product, and it's influenced by when and how we count ... and who is doing the counting. |
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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. |
Interviews
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How to Use Your Data in an Agile Environment: An Interview with Larry Maccherone
Podcast
In this interview, Larry Maccherone, the director of analytics and research at AgileCraft, explains how you can better use data within your software team. He digs into metrics and measurements within an agile environment and how to determine what data is valuable. |
Conference Presentations
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What You Can't Measure, You Can't Improve: Measurements for a Continuous Delivery Organization
Slideshow
Ashwin Desai has faced the daunting challenge of using measurements and metrics to assess and improve product quality through process change. Join him as he shares what he learned on the journey to move the sports technology firm Hudl from a reactive approach to quality to quantitative, data driven, proactive means to improve product quality. Just as Hudl itself provides the ability for coaches and teams to analyze and improve their performance based on data, they wanted to move the teams building Hudl to use the same approach to improve quality. Ashwin shares how they selected measurements, the work agile teams completed to get buy-in for the measurements, and how the data was normalized to provide understanding of the quality of each initiative and the variance between them. |
Ashwin Desai
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Setting and Measuring Individual Performance in Agile Teams
Slideshow
When software development teams work in waterfall environments, traditional performance management programs can help encourage personal development and innovation. However, Tina Rusnak says that when organizations move to agile, measuring performance takes on a new form that often causes... |
Tina Rusnak
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Video: The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Metrics Talk You'll Ever Need to Hear
Video
The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Metrics Talk You'll Ever Need to Hear Lee Copeland claims that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal... |
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
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How Metrics Programs Can Destroy Your Soul
Slideshow
Testers are often evaluated by metrics that don’t really quantify the value of their work. Metrics such as tests planned, tests executed, coverage achieved, and defects reported all... |
Scott Barber, SmartBear
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