The Latest
Transparency improves Governance[article] The article discusses IT governance and compliance, which tends to suggest more formal and rigorous processes. The authors explore how you can agile practices with in the framework of governance and compliance rules and regulations. |
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Experiences in Release Planning: Two Days in the Life of an Agile Newbie[article] Hello, my name is Maurice Sare. (my friends call me Mo). I am a first level tech lead/engineering manager at Gameonics, Inc, a multinational developer of distributed gaming for PCs and now, it seems, "smart phones." I've only been here a few weeks. Before that, I worked for a company that developed operating systems for smart phones, so I know something about the domain, but I've never worked at the applications layer, before. Before this, I hadn't had any formal training in agile development practices. |
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GNU Make User-Defined Functions[article] Creating GNU Make built-in functions is easy, but it does create a maintenance problem: the next time GNU Make is updated we'll need to port our changes to the new version. |
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The Pitfalls and Benefits of GNU Make Parallelization[article] Many build processes run for hours with build managers commonly typing 'make' and going home for the night. GNU Make's solution to this problem is parallel execution, which is a simple command-line option that causes GNU Make to run jobs in parallel using the dependency in the Makefile to run in the correct order. |
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Modern Distributed Teams[magazine] Traditionally, managing distributed teams has been perceived as difficult. But the advent of effective modern processes and tools is breaking through the obstacles and making distributed teams a viable—and valuable—option. Find out how to make the most of people, processes, and tools to create and maintain a successful distributed team. |
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How Much Is Enough?—Exploring Exploratory Software Testing[magazine] Exploratory testers design and execute tests in the moment, starting with an open mission and investigating new ideas as they arise. But how do we know when to stop? The first step is to recognize that we can't know when we're done, because any approach to answering the stopping question is necessarily heuristic. |
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What's In a Word?[magazine] 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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Mind the Gap[magazine] The requirements composition table is an effective technique comprising six steps that will help you assess an application's test coverage and identify gaps in your test suite even if you don't have any software requirements specifications. |
Yuri Chernak
February 27, 2008 |
Software Development Worst Practices[magazine] While some debate which, if any, industry practices deserve the designation "best practices," this tongue-in-cheek look at the horrors of some of software's "worst practices" drives home the value of the good ones and may help us improve the quality of our software. |
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Breaking Ground on SOA: How to Build and Test Your First Web Service[magazine] Web services are the foundation of today's service-oriented architecture. This article will teach you how to build a Web service from the ground up as well as how to test it using the three pillars of Web services testing—functional, performance, and interoperability tests. |
Mamoon Yunus
February 27, 2008 |
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The Other Side of Complexity[magazine] Software development has always been an exercise in managing complexity because there appears to be no end to the problems to which we can apply automatic computation. It has progressed as a discipline as good minds have created abstractions that transform that complexity into simplicity. |
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Make Your Mission Possible[magazine] Defining the work that belongs in your group and the work that doesn't belong can be challenging. A strong mission statement can help you defend your stance on what work you will and will not do, while ensuring you still provide the work your organization values. |
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Standards That Are Worth Following[article] Conventional wisdom tells us that standards are a good thing. They are based on best practices and provide guidance to help people do their jobs well. They are so widely accepted that their worth almost goes without saying. As with most things that go without saying, though, standards are not always what they are built up to be. In spite of the plethora of standards in the software industry, we still struggle to achieve successful projects. Even in organizations that are standard-centric, projects end up in challenged (or worse) states.
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Alan S. Koch
February 19, 2008 |
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Requirements for Software Security Assurance [article] Software Engineering technologies seem to support, and demand as well, the adequate level of security assurance in software projects. The need to consider security from the ground up is a fundamental tenet of secure system development. We can reduce the cost and efforts by implementing the security aspect right from beginning—from requirement phase onwards |
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Software Configuration Management: Software Assembly[article] A Software Assembly is a collection of multiple ‘built' configuration items, some or all of which have their own development process and their own release identifiers. These complete items are incorporated together into an assembly. The assembly aspect is the key to this technique, which is outlined in this article. |
Austin Hastings
February 18, 2008 |