Back in the 90’s self-managed teams were all the rage but they had a high rate of failure mainly because team members lacked people skills. These ideas of self-managed teams were borrowed by the Agile movement when in 2001 they formulated a ‘new’ way of working, based on Agile principles. However, self-managed teams only work well when team members understand a lot about human behavior and why people do the things they do!

This white paper examines the fresh techniques for assessing the effectiveness of QA organizations. Whether or not an organization has a dedicated testing team, today's testing is being completed more often by product managers, business analysts, customers, and programmers in addition to traditional testers. Evaluating all of these testing practices through a unified lens, using a maturity scoring scale that looks at all key testing responsibilities and functions, can be accomplished with the application of tried and true assessment frameworks.

The previous part of this article described ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 and 15288, the standards describing life cycle processes for software and systems. The standards are not just for process-heavy users. This part of the article will explain how entry-level users can apply the two standards.

There are definite signs of Agile methods (with a capital A) may be losing mind share or, at the very least, suffering from a certain amount of perhaps over-hype or over familiarity. Or maybe it is just the rise in cases of AFS (Agile Fatigue Syndrome). For some, agile is giving away to the rise of lean software development. Where will it end?