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Delivering More Business Value Where Needed

Within the software development community, one of the biggest movements over the past decade has been Agile Development whereby teams adopt practices and attitudes consistent with the now famous Agile Manifesto. Additionally, there has been much discussion over the past four to five years about applying principles from the Theory of Constraints (ToC) and Lean Product Development (Lean) to software development. This has had a tendency to muddy the surrounding waters as teams question whether they  should apply Agile, ToC, or Lean concepts. Are these three approaches mutually exclusive? Is there some hidden magic that can be unlocked by careful application of all three? Isn't it hard enough just trying to be Agile, without also trying to be Lean and ToC-ish? In this article we give an overview of Lean and ToC and show how they can be used in conjunction with Agile practices to focus on an organization's business value. By using elements of Lean, ToC, and Agile together more business value can be delivered with less effort.

In service oriented architectures (SOA), there are three essential components for delivery: published service; long-lived business processes; and short-lived business processes. Baselines are key to successful SOA delivery. They identify the service—and the components making up the service—being delivery to an environment and provide for co-existence of multiple services in the environments at the same time.

So much more than a bucket for your errors, exceptions can be a valuable tool that lets you communicate to your clients not only that there is a problem but why and where the code failed.

Software integration is never an easy task, and a good integration testing process is the key to success. This introduction to integration testing will help you identify what to test, typical faults to look out for, and effective means to uncover these faults.

You know that old saying that the best way to schedule software development is to come up with your best guess and divide by three? In this article, Joel Spolsky explains how to take the guesswork out of estimations by simulating schedules and creating probability curves that are more than just a shot in the dark.

In this month's Test Connection Michael Bolton recounts a valuable lesson he learned early in his testing career: What's the best way to test a product? Use it yourself.