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The IT industry is abuzz with conversations regarding continuous delivery, DevOps, and cloud development—and with good reason. Advances in agile software development methods, the integration of these practices into both on-premise and public clouds, and the emergence of end-to-end cloud platforms have been shown to cut development cycles by as much as half, greatly improve quality, and reduce costs. Even though this is an unbelievably exciting time, we need to work together on the issue of the “fractured cloud.”

Interfacing with all of the stakeholders in a cloud-based development environment presents unique challenges. Your people skills may very well determine whether or not you get what you need. Read on if you would like to be more effective in developing in the cloud.

In this Sticky ToolLook interview, Microsoft senior program manager Amit Chopra takes a look at some of the common communication breakdowns between QA and development teams and offers suggestions for avoiding or repairing those situations.

Agile software development always felt intuitive to me. Developing software incrementally, in close collaboration with the customer is the obvious way to deal with the uncertainty inherent in both software requirements and implementation. The technical practices of automating necessary but time consuming tests, and deploying, early and often are the obvious ways to give an team the ability to evaluate the  functionality you have and to to decide if the software works as expected. And it's also important to decide if what you built still makes sense given the current environment.

Configuration management (CM) has matured into a "must-have" discipline. But, many CM experts have failed to keep up with what's required to implement CM best practices. Find out what needs to be done to raise the bar for CM.

Most managers would consider management far too complicated to script. But the five key components of management—planning, staffing, organizing, directing, and controlling—are practiced just as often in testing. So, let's see some of those management scripts.

We all want to satisfy our users, but tailoring software to customers is easier said than done. Personas—a method to synthesize your primary users into abstract entities—facilitates understanding of goals and experiences.