The Latest
What's a Manager to Do?[magazine] Self-organizing teams still need managers. But those managers need to rethink how they do their jobs and consider how much self-management the team can take on. Finding the sweet spot between hands on and hands off is the key. |
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A Map by Any Other Name[magazine] A mapping illustrates a relationship between two things. In testing, a map might look like a road map, but it might also look like a list, a chart, a table, or a pile of stories. We can use any of these to help us think about test coverage. |
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Don't Fear the Repartee[magazine] Conflict reduces people's productivity and generosity toward the organization and their coworkers. These four steps can help defuse a conflict situation and improve the chances for a solution that at the least, both parties can live with. |
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Train Wreck Spotting[magazine] An oft-overlooked goal of encapsulation is to simplify usage. Without this sensibility, classes can end up with simplistic interfaces and callers can end up with method-call pile-ups. |
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Tool Choice as a Quality Issue[article] We need to choose an SCM tool. It will mean some work to make the choice and then more work to put it into practice. At least we don’t have to worry about it from a quality perspective, though. After all, the tools we choose to employ don’t affect the quality of the software we produce. Do they? Well, let’s think about this a bit. Hmmmmmm…
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Alan S. Koch
November 18, 2008 |
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A Word with the Wise: Assessment First with David Dang[article] David Dang, a senior practice manager for Questcon Technologies, explains why you need think about the tool you select. According to Dang, the assessment of the project and its goals should always come first in test automation projects, otherwise, you risk maintainability issues down the road. |
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Selecting a CM/ALM Tool That Will Add Value to All Users[article] Selecting a CM/ALM tool is no small task these days. The CM/ALM tool is no longer just another developer tool, such as a compiler or IDE environment. Instead, it forms the backbone of a development organization. It will strongly influence an organization's ability to measure and control quality, meet schedules, comply to requirements and assess development costs. It will also be the central focus for all development processes. It will support a key knowledge base, and will be viewed as the vault for both software and product assets. |
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Getting Started with Agile SCM[article] A prerequisite to any of the Agile SCM practices, such as integration build, private build, unit tests, and the like, is being able to set up a developer’s private workspace with the right code and tools so that you can code, build and test. In this article, we discuss the important, and often overlooked process of creating a development workspace, which is to say, getting started. |
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What is a CM Tool?[article] Does the title of this article sound silly? I mean, doesn’t everyone know what a configuration management (CM) tool is? Isn’t a CM tool something that provides version control functionality? Well, the short answer is yes but only in its most simplistic form. CM as a discipline goes well beyond simple version control. It is important to look beyond what vendors define as classic CM tools and consider CM in terms of the full practice and processes they offer. CM at its very essence covers identification, control, audit, and report. Many would expand control to include version control, change control, build management, and release engineering. |
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The Criteria for Choosing a Successful Scrum Pilot[article] Ask any Scrum trainer and they'll tell you the same thing: Adopting Scrum is hard. There are many reasons for this. Chief among them is that Scrum is so dramatically different—in terms of practices and principles—from traditional project management paradigms that it requires team members to truly reorient their attitudes and working behaviors. One common way to initiate a Scrum transformation is through a pilot project. But even then, how does a team that's never used Scrum before tell if a project is a strong candidate for a successful pilot? |
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Adding set operations to GNU Make[article] The new GMSL functions include ways of testing the relationship between sets and determining whether an individual element is in a set. |
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Metrics that Motivate[magazine] To implement a meaningful incentive system for your team, you need to select metrics that encourage the behaviors you need and the results you want. But first you have to decide what you need and want. |
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Follow the Process[magazine] Building better software does not rely on methodologies. "Following the process" omits important human factors that ultimately lead us to success. |
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Simple Summaries Of Complex Projects[magazine] How can we meaningfully summarize—in a brief status report without losing important details—the successes and setbacks our projects experience? |
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Google Web Toolkit: Writing Ajax Applications Test First[magazine] In part two of the series, Daniel introduces Google Web Toolkit's testing infrastructure and demonstrates how to build an Ajax application test first. |