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Alan S. Koch, PMP, author of Agile Software Development: Evaluating the Methods for your Organization, speaks, writes, and consults on effective software development. He is an SEI-Authorized PSP Instructor, and he welcomes your feedback and questions; send e-mail to Road2Quality@ASKProcess.com. Visit http://www.ASKProcess.com to learn how to improve the return on your software investment by focusing on the quality of both your software products and the processes you use to development them.
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 A friend and fellow consultant has been known to react quite strongly to the phrase "Best Practice". Anyone who is unlucky enough to have James within earshot when they utter that phrase is likely to receive a dressing down for using it.
"There is NO such thing as 'best practice'!" he will inform them in his not-so gentle manner. "There are only good practices that are appropriate under certain circumstances!"
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 08:02 |
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 Testing is such an integral part of our software projects that we often don't stop to think about why we do it. We must do it! What else is there to know?
It is obvious that software that has not been tested is unready for deployment. But as painful experience has taught us, testing does not guarantee that the software is fit to deploy. Even rigorously tested software may still have hidden fatal flaws.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 18 February 2010 11:14 |
Change Management is not Change Control |
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Written by Alan S. Koch
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Thursday, 20 August 2009 09:19 |
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 A key part of planning configuration management for our projects is determining how we will manage change. After all, "change happens", and any good configuration manager is concerned with how it is managed.
Unfortunately, more often than not, our processes focus more on controlling change than on managing it! That is, we put a lot of effort into trying to keep change from happening, and relatively less effort into ensuring that when (not if, but when) change happens, we manage it effectively.
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Tool Choice as a Quality Issue |
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Written by Alan S. Koch
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Monday, 17 November 2008 18:00 |
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 We need to choose an SCM tool. It will mean some work to make the choice, and then more work to put it into practice. But at least we don’t have to worry about it from a quality perspective. After all, the tools we choose to employ don’t affect the quality of the software we produce.
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Last Updated on Thursday, 23 July 2009 10:54 |
Standards That Are Worth Following |
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Written by Alan S. Koch
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Monday, 18 February 2008 16:52 |
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 Conventional wisdom tells us that standards are a good thing. They are
based on best practices, and they provide guidance to help people do
their jobs well. They are so widely accepted that their worth almost
goes without saying.
But as with most things that go without saying, standards are not
always what they are billed to be. In spite of the plethora of
standards in the software industry, we still struggle mightily to
achieve successful projects. Even in organizations that are
standard-centric, projects end up in challenged (or worse) states.
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Last Updated on Monday, 14 April 2008 07:16 |
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