The Latest

	Telling It Like It Is: Test Status Reports as Tools for Change[magazine] Producing regular test status reports makes your progress—and problems—visible to those outside your group. Here's how spending a couple of hours a week on gathering and reporting results can be crucial to your software development team's success.	Pete TerMaat July 30, 2002
	Use Cases, Ten Years Later[magazine] Use cases have experienced a long and sometimes rocky history. Look back on the evolution of use cases to better understand how to use them today.	Alistair Cockburn July 30, 2002
	Release Criteria: Is This Software Done?[magazine] For any project, the big question is: "Is this software ready to release yet?" Explore how to answer that question with confidence, by learning how to define success and how to gain consensus on release criteria.	Johanna Rothman July 30, 2002
	Karl Wiegers on Humanizing Peer Reviews[magazine] How serious are you about the quality of your work? Learn how to set aside egos and start benefiting from the experience and perspective of your colleagues.	Karl E. Wiegers July 30, 2002
	A Lesson in Scripting: Improve Your Testing with Programming Skills[magazine] You can write simple programs to help with your daily testing tasks using Perl or other scripting languages. Here's a primer on scripting languages and programming skills for testers.	Danny R. Faught July 30, 2002
	Becoming Indispensable[magazine] How can you achieve the lofty status of being an "indispensable" employee? Elisabeth Hendrickson shares some valuable tips, including how to adjust your attitude, where to invest your time, and how to communicate better.	Elisabeth Hendrickson July 29, 2002
	A Look at the Ruby Scripting Language[magazine] The Ruby language has gained many followers recently. Ruby offers many of the same features that made Perl a popular scripting language, but also has the advantage of being a fully object-oriented language. While developing an object-oriented application in Perl might be a bit clumsy, Ruby supports object-oriented programming quite naturally. This can offer many advantages when developing a large testing application.	Phil Tomson July 29, 2002
	Small Change, Big Trouble[magazine] Ross Collard researches the cause of coding errors, and recommends some process improvements companies should implement, including establishing the minimum amount of regression testing required for new releases.	Ross Collard July 29, 2002
	Don't Use Bug Counts to Measure Testers[magazine] Cem Kaner tells us why we should not use bug counts to measure testers. Using examples, he illustrates two problems: 1) bug counts are poor measures of individual performance; and 2) the side effects of using bug counts as a measure are serious.	Cem Kaner July 25, 2002
	Gathering Users for Great Requirements[magazine] If you buy a hammer, you are not considered a master carpenter automatically. The same holds true for tool knowledge alone solving requirements problems. Kelley Schmidt shares the biggest lesson she learned on a project: commercial process and tools alone cannot lead to project success.	Kelley Schmidt July 11, 2002
	Introducing Test-First Development[magazine] Testers are often frustrated to receive a product for testing that is riddled with bugs. They want to know why some of the bugs couldn't have been caught during development. If only some tests could be run before the code was handed off! Jason Bedunah learned the benefits of test-first development first hand. Here, he introduces a framework for testing and coding that he found to be very helpful, and he gives some pointers on getting developers on board with test-first development.	Jason L. Bedunah July 11, 2002
	Retrospectives: They're Not Just For Developers Anymore[presentation] Traditional methods for improving testing include training, hiring, adding new processes, building infrastructure, and buying new tools. But what about increasing the capability of the team?	Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
	Testing Mission Critical Software Changes[presentation] This paper is based on a recent experience implementing and testing a large new software capability in a maintenance organization which had not dealt with a large change in some time. The capability was called	Alan Ogletree, United Space Alliance
	Identifying Testing Priorities Through Risk Analysis[presentation] It's impossible to test everything-even in the most trivial of systems. Tight time schedules and shortages of trained testing personnel exacerbate this problem; so do changing priorities, feature creep, and loss of resources.	Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
	Career Path Activities for Test Professionals[presentation] Ever wonder how some people seem to find the time to always do that "little extra" to benefit their careers? Have you ever thought about writing an article, speaking at a conference, or even teaching a course, but didn't know where to begin?	Eric Patel, RapidSQA

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