Better Software Magazine Archive:

July/Aug 2011

IN THIS ISSUE

When Software Smells Bad
By William Wake
Dr. Kevin Rutherford

Most software needs to be "maintainable" and have high "internal quality." But what does that mean in practical terms? Code smells form a vocabulary for discussing code quality and how well suited code might be to change. The smells also provide good indications as to what to refactor and how.

Raising The Bar For Configuration Management
By Bob Aiello

Configuration management (CM) has matured into a "must-have" discipline. But, many CM experts have failed to keep up with what's required to implement CM best practices. Find out what needs to be done to raise the bar for CM.

Ask To See His ...
By Lee Copeland

Most managers would consider management far too complicated to script. But the five key components of management—planning, staffing, organizing, directing, and controlling—are practiced just as often in testing. So, let's see some of those management scripts.

Imaginary Friends: Creating Software with Personas
By Shmuel Gershon

We all want to satisfy our users, but tailoring software to customers is easier said than done. Personas—a method to synthesize your primary users into abstract entities—facilitates understanding of goals and experiences.

Designing an Agile Portfolio and Program Coordination System
By Arlen Bankston
Bob Payne

Scaling Agile to the enterprise can be challenging once you start looking at the Program and Portfolio level. How do you design an effective coordination system that encourages collaboration, communication, transparency and is flexible, easy to implement and rapidly evolvable? We will explore key aspects of creating a simple but effective agile-ready coordination system for managing such initiatives, based upon the authors' observations and experiences across widely differing companies.

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