The Latest

	Test-Driven Design for the Project Manager[article] Many developers and testers are familiar with test-driven design (TDD), but how can managers use it to drive project implementation? In this article, John Goodpasture offers a guide to TDD design from the project manager’s perspective.	John C. Goodpasture March 1, 2011
	FAQ: What are good sources of less common agile test ideas?[magazine] In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Rob Sabourin answers one of the questions students ask him most often.	Robert Sabourin March 1, 2011
	Skills Are in the Eye of the Job Holder[magazine] A letter from the Better Software magazine editor.	Heather Shanholtzer March 1, 2011
	How The Cloud Changes Software Production[magazine] Creating services in the cloud enables new capabilities and features to improve your product and empower your team. But the cloud also introduces challenges as to how to build and test such services. This introduction to the cloud shows how you can leverage this powerful technology and addresses how the cloud affects software development, testing, and the team.	Seth Eliot February 28, 2011
	Action Based Testing[magazine] For many organizations, automation is a burden--even with good tools. Keywords are popular but don't suffice on their own. Action based testing places a high emphasis on modularized test design, not only making tests lean and mean but also allowing for very stable and maintainable automation.	Hans Buwalda February 28, 2011
	Learning For Agile Testers, Part 1[magazine] What makes testers successful on agile teams? What skills do agile testers need to enjoy an exciting career and how can they learn those skills? In part one of our "Learning for Agile Testers" series, we explain what a well-rounded agile tester ought to know–and it goes way beyond technical skills!	Lisa Crispin Janet Gregory February 28, 2011
	Filling The Blank Page[magazine] Having trouble starting projects, understanding scope and business processes, or with estimation? Mark shares some tips and techniques to avoid common business analysis pain points at the early part of a new project assignment.	Mark Jenkins February 28, 2011
	Increase Quality with Table-Driven Acceptance Tests[magazine] Vague or ambiguous requirements can cause loops in development processes. Creating requirements that include acceptance tests cuts down on the looping and increases the flow of working software to the customer.	Ken Pugh Al Shalloway February 28, 2011
	Building a Competitive Software Capability: Creative Destruction[article] In this excerpt from Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust: Building a Competitive Software Capability, Watts Humphrey and James Over explain why these changes must be a high priority for software companies and other organizations for whom knowledge is a valuable asset.	Watts S. Humphrey James W. Over February 22, 2011
	Implementing Scrum (Agile) and CMMI Together[article] CMMI and Scrum are two commonly used frameworks we have seen groups struggle with when using them together. This article describes how these frameworks aren't really at odds with each other and explains how implementation is the key to using them together.	Neil Potter February 18, 2011
	Chatterboxes and Cave Dwellers[article] Both introverts and extroverts can be valuable contributors of hard work and great ideas, they just go about accomplishing those things in different ways. Learn how these two groups of people coexist, what makes them tick, and how to help them flourish.	Naomi Karten February 16, 2011
	Getting Empirical about Refactoring[article] Often when we refactor, we look at local areas of code. If we take a wider view, using information from our version control systems, we can get a better sense of the effects of our refactoring efforts.	Michael Feathers February 15, 2011
	Mentorship in QA and Software Development[article] Mentorship programs in software delivery teams are consistently reinvented as they react to the cries of those who complain that they are not receiving the challenge and mentoring they should be getting. Companies struggle to bridge the gap between employee morale and shipping the products that support the bottom line. Why is mentorship so difficult to get right?	Eric Mumford February 15, 2011
	Effective Leadership Communication[article] In most workplaces, there’s an institutional hierarchy that may influence how we react in situations that require us to step up. Navigating effective communication means knowing when we should listen quietly to leaders and when we should challenge or question.	Payson Hall February 15, 2011
	DevOps 101: The Future of Development, Quality and Operations[article] DevOps is a movement that is underway or at least in the very early stages of infancy as a way to rid the IT world of some if not most of its silo’s. Silos have existed in Information Technology (IT) from the beginning for two reasons, the complex nature of early IT systems and because that’s the way businesses are run, for the most part. Silo’s are an easy way for Accounting to make sense of business operations, for example, marketing only does marketing activities, sales does sales, distribution does distribution, etc. So fast forward to today’s IT environment where Agile is taking hold and become more prevalent, where IT systems are becoming more complex, where news reaches the rest of the worlds in seconds not days or weeks. Large scale failures and inefficiency is becoming not only way of life, in some people’s eyes it’s the norm in IT. DevOps is an attempt to correct this: Will it succeed? Time will tell.	Joe Townsend February 15, 2011

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