From Peer Review to Pair Programming There is always talk about improving application quality. In many instances, a large quality program gets initiated that either takes a lot of resources and time or introduces change that is too challenging for the organization (or project team) to handle. It is usually better to start on a smaller scale. Focusing on improving application quality in the programming phase, a couple of suggests are: 1) initiate peer reviews (e.g., code reviews) and/or 2) initiate pair programming. While peer review is more widely known and used in the software development industry, pair programming offers more problem solving possibilities. Both are known to reduce defects and improve quality. The key is to introduce a small initiative like peer review or pair programming ensuring you are building the practice for success. |
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Test Software before You Code Testing doesn't have to begin after the code has been written. In this column, Jeff Patton resurrects the oldest and most overlooked development technique, which can be used to test a product before any piece of it materializes. |
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Agile06 - François Beauregard - GreenPepper Software
Podcast
François Beauregard talks about his new venture at GreenPepper software, a combined test tool, bug tracking and management software. |
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Tool Integration In Distributed Agile Development This article provides an overview of various tools, integration strategies and their benefits in agile environments. These tools would come in handy in implementing key agile practices like daily builds, refactoring, continuous integration and test driven development. |
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Target-specific and Pattern-specific GNU Make macros This article introduces target- and pattern-specific variables and shows how they can be used to selectively alter options within a build based on the name of a target or targets being built. |
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The Case for Peer Review The $1 billion bug and why no one talks about peer code review. It was only supposed to take an hour. The bad news was that we had a stack of customer complaints. The latest release had a nasty bug that slipped through QA. The good news was that some of those complaints included descriptions of the problem - an unexpected error dialog box - and one report had an attached log file. We just had to reproduce the problem using the log and add this case to the unit tests. Turn around a quick release from the stable branch and we're golden. |
Jason Cohen
August 1, 2006 |
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Principles of Agile Version Control: From Object-oriented Design to Project-oriented Branching In this article, the authors explore translation of object-oriented design principles to codelines, branching, and promotion. In addition, they expand on the concept of moving from task-based development (TBD) to project-oriented branching (POB). |
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Process Perspective: Keep All Re-use in mind in the Software Development Process Software re-use is a worthy and noble ideal to aim for during any development, but why not let's take a bigger picture view of the whole software development environment. Make the goal to set up our process so that as much as possible is re-used on subsequent projects. Here are some thoughts on achieving this. |
Charles Edwards
July 19, 2006 |
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Improving Application Quality by Controlling Application Infrastructure Today, applications are undeniably the proxies for key business processes. So, improving application quality drives directly to improving overall business performance. It's no wonder then that improving application quality and uptime is a top of mind issue for IT managers and executives. |
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An Incremental Technique to Pay Off Testing Technical Debt Technical debt can shorten a product's life. But when technical debt mounts, it can be difficult to see how to pay it off. Using the practices discussed in this column, Johanna Rothman explains how you can start paying off that debt—and how to ease the product's development and maintenance for a long time. |
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