Release Management

"Quality" is one of the most misunderstood and elusive aspects of system development. Ask five people to define quality and you'll probably get five different answers. Although everyone thinks he knows what it is, very few can really define it in context. High quality software doesn't just happen-quality must be built in from the start. In this highly interactive presentation, Tom Staab defines quality and explains why quality planning is important. Join in the discussion about where most defects are injected into software, how to establish meaningful quality metrics, ways to communicate results to management in language they understand, and how to calculate the return-on-investment that can be expected from quality improvement activities. Quality must be defined in a project's specific context, quantified at the beginning of the project, and measured throughout the development lifecycle.

As agile software development leaves the early adoption stage and moves solidly into the mainstream, Mary Poppendieck reminds us that fads in software development have come and gone before. What makes us think that agile is different? Unless we learn from previous attempts to improve development practices, we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. Mary describes three proven paths to failure: (1) Copy what successful companies are doing-You don't get to be world class by chasing after best practices, you get there by inventing them; (2) Force everyone to follow the standard process-The best path to success is leveraging the intelligence of "ordinary" people in the relentless improvement of your current process; and (3) Focus on technical success-Technical success is a euphemism for business failure.

There is no longer any question that-when appropriately used-quantitative measurement and management of software projects works. As with any tool, the phrase "appropriately used" tells the tale. Drawing on his experiences using quantitative and statistical measurement, Ed Weller provides insights into the key phrase "appropriate use." Ed offers cases of useful-and not so useful-attempts to use the "high maturity" concepts in the Capability Maturity Model Integration® (CMMI®) to illustrate how you can either achieve a high return on your investment in these methods or fail miserably. After an introduction to the theory of statistical measurement, Ed presents examples of the successful use of statistical measures and discusses the traps and pitfalls of their incorrect implementation.

One of the features that makes Eclipse so popular within the Java community is the abundance of easy to use plug-ins. Many of these are freely available open-source tools. Plug-ins are available for virtually anything from implementing database connectivity to instant messaging. Because code quality is a critical aspect of production software applications, Eclipse has built-in tools that help developers write and deliver high quality code. Levent Gurses has employed a number of external plug-ins, including PMD, CheckStyle, JDepend, FindBugs, Cobertura, CPD, Metrics, and others to transform Eclipse into a powerhouse for writing, testing, and releasing high quality Java code. Levent shows you how to use Eclipse to improve your team's coding habits, enforce organizational standards, and zap bugs before they reach the client.

• The standard quality check tools available in Eclipse