Improve Your Communication Skills To Create Better Software Writing great software requires a lot of communication, and not just the client-to-server variety; person-to-person communication is crucial in a well-performing team. While it's easy to focus exclusively on improving our ability to communicate through the code we write, it's important to remember that building software is a communal experience: developers work with customers, testers, product owners, and other developers.
Here are some techniques and articles I use to reflect upon and improve my own communication skills: |
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Managing Successful Agile Build Management Teams While Agile methodologies have made tremendous advances in programming circles, build and release management teams have traditionally shied away from a “full agile” approach. In informal polling of Build Engineers, I found only one team outside of my own that ran an Agile shop; while there are many out there who do, there are tender points that need special consideration.
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The Truth about Practices and “Being” Agile-Lean A working definition of “practice” is: A practice is a common and adaptive approach for doing something with a specific purpose in mind. When “being” agile and applying a practice we are focused on value-added not the means. |
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Negative Positive Testers who point out project risks are often perceived as "negative" thinkers. Software test consultant Fiona Charles (an optimist by nature and a pessimist by trade) writes about how a culture of unthinking optimism pervades our organizations and our society, and describes some of its detrimental effects on software projects. |
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Real-Time Problem Detection in Software Development Designing and developing software, it's usually cheaper to prevent problems from ever occurring (by making a decision at design-time) rather than patching them as they happen. But detecting problems in real-time is a useful skill in many professions, including one as different as recording audio books. |
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Empowering Self-Organization and Energizing Project Planning with the Commander's Intent Things change, and when they do, it's best to be ready to change with them. The best plans are doomed to fail if they aren't malleable. In this column, George Schlitz and Giora Morein take a look at the military concept of "Commander's Intent" and how it can apply to non-military project planning. |
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Crowdsource Testing Through the power of the Internet, people around the world are working together to solve problems in a faster, more cost-effective way than ever before. Crowdsourcing is a term that has been used to describe the process of requesting a crowd to perform a task rather than hiring consultants or contractors. There have been various models used to harness the collective brainpower of the masses, and this article delves into three examples. Thanks to the power of Web 2.0, publicity is easily spread world-wide to recruit participants who will take part in competitions or collaborative events aimed at solving a problem or completing a task. |
Yvette Francino
January 22, 2010 |
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Database Compare and Synchronize Methods as a Part of the Software Release Management Process By testing migration processes between environments, bugs are able to be found earlier, and before the migration to production. Using automatic packages, and well-thought out staging areas, migration can be a less painful, and more informative process than it may have been for you in the past. |
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A Recap of the Last Decade of Configuration Management Joe Farah looks back at the last ten years to see where CM and ALM has come from and then forward another ten to see where it's going. In some ways, a lot has happened in the past decade, but in other ways, the progress has been painfully slow. |
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Flickering Test Failures and End-to-End Tests In "Growing Object Oriented Software Guided By Tests", Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce talk about the dangers of tests that occasionally fail, otherwise known as flickering tests. These failures can cause teams to start seeing these failures as false positives, and distrust their build results. I know - it's happened to me, especially with end-to-end Selenium tests. |
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