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What do you do when your boss tells you to do something your conscience won't allow? Follow a test manager as she is faced with an ethical dilemma that forces her to pick between what is right and what will save her job. It's a tough position to be in, find out how to come through it with your head held high.

When we deliver software products, we need to be able to tell our customers what they're getting. Not only product documentation, but specifically, every time we deliver a new release we need to relay what problems were fixed and what new features were added. If the software is subject to periodic audits, we need to tell them even more, especially the abiltiy to trace a requirement or change request to what was changed.

Linda Hayes has always found software development metrics to be problematic. The data either skews perceptions of the project or the actions of the team members. In this article, Linda explains that by turning down the volume of what is being said and measured and simply watching what is actually happening, you can strip away the assumptions and biases that often obscure the truth.

Service Desks traditionally serve the operational and production aspects of IT organizations and their respective business units.  However, business services that consist of applications typically start their lifecycle as requirements from the originating business unit, then follow a development lifecycle before entering the operations realm.  This development lifecycle
is commonly a blind spot for service desks manifesting most typically via an incident logged against an application in production requiring maintenance or upgrade work to be completed by development.

In this article, the authors propose that the most effective teams—those that show a tremendous improvement in productivity and value to their organizations—have individual team members who take ownership, act responsibly, and are disciplined in recognizing and responding to change at a personal level.

In this continuation of his June 2007 article on floating-point numbers, Chuck Allison explains why certain compilers miscalculate sin(x) for large arguments and why some get it right. He also divulges that floating-point spacing is the key to getting the most from numeric computations.

Do your team members jump into a project with both feet before they fully understand what problem they are trying to solve? We’ve all been convinced that for our customers faster is better. But is that really what they want? Jeff Patton thinks it’s time for us to slow down and focus on the quality of our products.