The Latest
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Creative License[magazine] Project managers seldom worry about nurturing the creative sides of team members. But if you plan and schedule for creativity the way you do for the more tangible aspects of your software project, you might be pleasantly surprised at the practical results you gain. |
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Form Fitting: Patterns to Judge the Effectiveness of Use Cases[magazine] You don't have to be Giorgio Armani to fashion effective use cases. Use case patterns can provide you with a vocabulary to help you describe and judge the quality of your use cases. Find out how you can use these patterns to improve your requirements modelin |
Steve Adolph
April 14, 2005 |
Show Me the Money[magazine] Turn to The Last Word, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. This month, read how adding gauges to your software can show stakeholders how well it is meeting their goals. |
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2004 Salary Survey[magazine] Each year we ask you, the readers, to tell us about your job, your experience, and your compensation. We then present our findings in a format that makes it easy to compare yourself to your peers. Check it out. |
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eXtreme Makeover[magazine] How one manager transformed an organization historically known for late delivery, poor quality, and low morale into an energized team that produces high-quality software on schedule. |
Larry Bernstein
April 4, 2005 |
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Testing with an Accent[magazine] It's a small world after all, and no where is that more evident than in the world of software, where differences in language and desktop settings can cause applications to crash with no warning. |
Paul Carvalho
April 4, 2005 |
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Automation, Retaliation, and Litigation[magazine] Get the software engineering slant on items from the recent news. |
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The Peculiar Nature of Requirements[magazine] Turn to The Last Word, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. This month, Karl Wiegers shares some common misperceptions about requirements. |
Karl E. Wiegers
April 4, 2005 |
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Honeybees, Blimps, and Lava Lamps[magazine] We're pleased to bring you technical editors who are well respected in their fields. Get their take on everything that relates to the industry, technically speaking. In this issue, discover why reflex might be the key to better software development. |
Brian Marick
April 4, 2005 |
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Combined Strengths[magazine] One school of thought says each should do what he's best at and no more. But one company has graduated to a new way of life. Instead of isolating testers and business analysts, the two teams are melded into one—resulting in a more robust product created in less time at a reduced cost. Could this hybrid approach work for you? |
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Double Duty: Repurpose Unit Tests to Create System Documentation[magazine] System documentation is a pain to do and it's even harder to keep up to date. What if, by refining the unit tests you already are doing, you could create documentation automatically, and have it be automatically updated? Find out how one team is making it work for them. |
Brian Button
April 4, 2005 |
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The Proper Care and Feeding of Programmers[magazine] Developers are a unique bunch. They tend to have innate characteristics that cause them to approach problems in ways that leave their managers scratching their heads. Discover what natural behaviors are likely to cause conflicts and what you can do to work with those instinctual traits, instead of against them. |
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Cook until Done[article] There's no shortage of advice on how you should model, design, test, build, and deploy your software project. Every author, trainer, and pundit will swear up and down that "they know the secret." They know how to build great software—they've done it before and all you have to do is follow their lead. Buy their software, read their books, buy their tools, attend their seminars, and do it just like they do it and you'll be a success, right? But somehow it doesn't seem to be that easy. In this column, the first in a series of articles that will explore the different avenues of software development, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmers, begin the journey by revealing that learning software development isn't as easy as the pros make it out to seem. Find out why these books and seminars work for them, but not always for the rest of us. |
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The Goldilocks Parable: How Much Process Is Just Right[article] Getting process improvement "just right" is difficult. Go too far in the definition of processes, and it really does get too hot, with the heat coming from the people trying to use the processes. On the other hand process definitions that are too short to contain anything of value will leave users in the cold, and then there will be no improvement in the organization. Ed Weller states that a useful process improvement activity develops a set of process artifacts that meets the needs of the user. This helps the organization capture "tribal lore" and cast it into a set of process definitions that eliminates waste and improves time-to-market. |
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Good Tool. Bad Application[magazine] Excel does a great job as a spreadsheet, but when you try to push it into service as a database you may be in for some rude surprises. |