Home  Articles Columns Road to Quality The Road to Quality - Subscribe to this RSS Feed - 
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.
|
|
Written by Alan S. Koch
|
|
Monday, 18 February 2008 |
 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.
|
|
|
Written by Alan S. Koch
|
|
Monday, 17 December 2007 |
 "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.
|
|
|
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?
|
|
|
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?
|
|
|
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:
|
|
|
|
|
|
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!
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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!"
|
|
| << Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>
| | Results 1 - 9 of 23 |
|
Recent Issues of CM Journal
Whitepaper SpotlightStay up to date with Configuration Management and Application Lifecycle
Management technology products and services by browsing our featured white
papers below:
See all the Featured Whitepapers>>
|
Tool Spotlight
|
CollabNet
CollabNet Subversion is an enterprise-ready distribution of Subversion® that includes, in one package,...
Read More
|
|
|
AccuRev
AccuRev is a best-of-breed, process-centric software configuration
management (SCM) solution for...
Read More
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
