The Latest

Building on his earlier columns covering James Bach's Heuristic Test Strategy Model, Michael Bolton delivers nine techniques--each of which affords a different way of modeling the product--to help you test your systems for a greater variety of bugs.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. (Agile Manifesto principle 12)

A cornerstone of agility is the team's commitment to continued reflection and adaptation. For most teams, there is a natural cadence to this process as iterations occur frequently, typically every one to two weeks apart, and releases occur every two to four months. As such, the iteration boundary represents a frequent opportunity for immediate feedback and quick mid-course correction, primarily focused on the team's ability to simultaneously define, code and test new functionality in a time box. At the release boundary, the measures move to those things that reflect the team and the organizations ability to move that functionality from "inventory" to delivered product or system. In this article, we'll describe a set of iteration and release metrics that have been used to good effect by a number of agile teams. In our experience, teams that are effective in using these iteration and release metrics have the best chance to achieve the maximum benefits of agile.

Novices are often hampered by test-driven design's legacy terminology and notation. Behavior-driven development shifts the emphasis from testing to specification. Dan North describes how behavior-driven development makes established agile practices more accessible and effective for teams new to agile.

I am often asked questions like:
"Why does it take so long to apply a label to 30,000 elements."

The short answer is "because you are applying a label to 30,000 elements".

In this article, Ask Mr. Make shows a simple hack to GNU Make to cause it to do the right thing when the contents of a source file change.

The terms version control and configuration management are often used interchangeably, while some view them as separate disciplines. In fact, version control capabilities are a part of a well-defined configuration management process. We will explore these related disciplines and show how they can be applied successfully to problems facing IT professionals today attempting to manage their application infrastructure.

I am often asked why ClearCase does not automatically perform "Keyword substitution or expansion". That I can't answer, but I can say that I was never a big proponent of inserting meta-data into source files that already have the meta-data associated. With ClearCase that is easily readable with cleartool commands like find, ls, desc and others.