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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.





Standards That Are Worth Following Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Monday, 18 February 2008
feb08followingwideConventional 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.
 
The Definition of "Done" Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Monday, 17 December 2007
dec07dictionarysmall"I thought you said you were done with the Cranfragle last week!" Sue demanded. "I just talked with Alan and he said that you haven't even started on the GreenFlop."

"Yes", Joe answered, "I'll be starting on that tomorrowies that have to do with the Cranfragle?"

Sue's jaw dropped. "How can you ask that? You're not done until the GreenFlop is done! " What does it mean when a member of your team says that something is "done"? Taking the time to define this critical term does much more than avoid disagreements. It can also save critical project time and avoid embarrassing oversights.
 
The One Right Way to Achieve High-Quality Requirements: Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Don't Expect There Is One Right Way!
Many authorities have undertaken to lay out the One Right Way to engineer system requirements. Although there are similarities among them, what is most striking is the diversity in approaches, and in some cases, conflicting philosophies. What are we to make of these dueling authorities and their competing guidelines?
 
Audit Trails, Traceability - Because Sometimes Things Go Wrong (And no, they are not to place blame! Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Monday, 20 August 2007
Any time we make a change to production, there is the risk that something will go wrong. Risk is a fact. The only way to eliminate risk is to never do anything. (But of course, that is not an option.) So we are left with actions we can take to mitigate those risks. Configuration Management (CM) is mainly about risk mitigation. Everything we do in CM is designed to reduce the likelihood that things will go wrong, or to reduce the adverse impact when they do go wrong. CM helps us to avoid many failures, and to recover quickly from those few that we can't avoid. But how do audit trails and traceability fit into this picture? Traceability doesn't prevent errors, and an audit trail does little to help me to recover from one. Does this mean they aren't valuable CM tools?
 
Pragmatic Agile Development - The PAD Roadmap Print
Written by Michael Fischer   
Friday, 11 May 2007

In March, our newsletter explored the differences between Agile and the Waterfall methodology for software development.  In April, our newsletter introduced a blended approach to Agile development called Pragmatic Agile Development (PAD), and explained that PAD is designed to encompass all of the measurement and oversight of the Waterfall methodology (similar to approaches used by PMI / CMMI) with the nimbleness of Agile development, providing a methodology that yields the best of both worlds.

This month, we discuss the PAD Roadmap, the bible for PAD.  Below are the prior newsletters published on this topic: 

 
Is Your Metrics Database Write-Only? Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Monday, 19 March 2007
Goal-Question-Metric to the rescue!

A "Write-Only" database? Yes, I have seen them, and many of you probably have seen them as well! Those are the cases where organizations are constantly collecting metrics and writing them to a database, but not using that data.

There is no question that a write-only metrics database is unhealthy for the organization. But collecting no metrics at all is also unhealthy. Of course, the ideal would be for us to collect metrics that we actually can use - and then to actually use them! And GQM (Goal-Question-Metric) can get us there!
 
Assuring Quality: Beyond Testing & Reviews Print
Written by Alan S. Koch   
Monday, 19 February 2007
"Test? Of course we test! It seems like we spend way too much time testing. And we review designs and code, too. But all we are doing is finding defects. Lots and lots of defects! Isn't there more to QA than finding all of these defects?"

Yes, there is much more to QA than that. In fact, testing and reviews should really be called "Quality Control", or QC for precisely that reason. They don't really assure quality; they merely check the quality and keep the product from going into production if it is too bad.
 
Software Quality -- Service Quality; What's the Difference? Print
Written by Administrator   
Monday, 16 October 2006
We have spent so many years talking about building high-quality software products that it is easy for us to lose sight of one very important fact: The software products that we build do not stand alone. They are only parts of the IT Services on which our customers depend to be able to do their jobs.
 
ITIL (The Information Technology Infrastructure Library) shows us how the software that we build fits into the larger context of IT services. ITIL is a process model for IT Service Management. It describes all of the processes that are required to provide valuable services to our IT customers.

 
Does Senior Management Really Care About Quality? Print
Written by Administrator   
Wednesday, 20 September 2006
"Sometimes", Bob mused, "It seems like senior management doesn't care about the quality of the systems we build. I wonder if they care about quality at all!"

"Oh, there is no question in my mind!" Sue assured him. "I know that they don't care. All they care about it hitting a schedule. They couldn't care less about how well the software works!"

Meanwhile, in the boardroom...

"What's wrong with your people?" the COO barked at the CIO. "They can never seem to deliver a system the works right. Between the bugs that have to be fixed and the difficulty that people have with figuring out how to use it, I wonder if we might be better off using pencil and paper!"

 
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