Release Management

Software and technology managers often quote industry benchmarks such as The Standish Group's CHAOS report on software project failures; other organizations use this data to judge their internal operations. Although these external benchmarks can provide insights into your company's software development performance, you need to balance the picture with internal information to make an objective evaluation. Jim Brosseau takes a deeper look at common benchmarks, including the CHAOS report, published SEI benchmark data, and more. He describes the pros and cons of these commonly used industry benchmarks with key insights into often-quoted statistics. Take away an approach that Jim has used successfully with companies to help them gain an understanding of the relationship between the demographics, practices, and performance in their groups and how these relate to external benchmarks.

You've made a commitment to automate unit testing as part of your development process or you are spending precious resources for automated functional testing at higher levels. You may be asking yourself: How good are those tests anyway? Are many tests checking the same thing while large parts of the code go completely untested? Are your tests triggering the exceptions that normally show up only in production? Are your automated tests adequately covering the code, the requirements-both, neither? Andrew discusses the truths and untruths about code coverage and looks at the tools available to gather and report coverage metrics in both the opensource and commercial worlds. He describes the different types of code coverage, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to interpret the results of coverage reports.

• The concept of mutation testing and how it fits into a code coverage strategy

While effective for modeling requirements, analysis, or design of a software system, UML diagrams are typically used in isolation or only for portions of a system. The resulting inconsistencies have the potential to create more confusion than clarity, negating the investment in the modeling process. Explore tips, tricks, and techniques to build a complete, traceable UML model for all aspects of a software application. Thomas Bullinger shares ways to gather behavioral requirements and map them into UML use cases. Learn to map use cases onto sequence or activity diagrams and extract them onto class diagrams. In a recursive process, each of the UML diagrams and associated descriptions is logically related to ensure a complete problem model and a consistent design solution.

• Create self-consistent UML models of requirements behavior and designs
• Manage change in UML models to reflect updates to requirements

Many organizations have achieved success in using the SEI Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®) as a framework for their process improvement program. Steven Lett describes the structure and contents of the CMMI®, including the continuous and staged versions of the model. He discusses each of the five maturity levels and their process areas, the specific and generic practices that exist within each process area, and the typical process documentation and work products required for each. Learn an effective approach that companies take in driving change across their software engineering organizations. Find out how the model is meant to be interpreted and take back examples of the successes that companies have experienced in using both CMMI® and the earlier Capability Maturity Model (CMM®). Capability Maturity Model® and CMMI® are registered trademarks of Carnegie Mellon University.