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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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.