development lifecycles

Articles

Reusability vs. Usability: Where to Draw the Line?

Arbitrary reuse of code components could deteriorate overall usability. In this column, Linda Hayes explains the good and bad qualities of reusability and five factors one should keep in mind when managing reusability to get the most of it.

Linda Hayes's picture Linda Hayes
A Word with the Wise: Assessment First with David Dang

David Dang, a senior practice manager for Questcon Technologies, explains why you need think about the tool you select. According to Dang, the assessment of the project and its goals should always come first in test automation projects, otherwise, you risk maintainability issues down the road.

Joey McAllister's picture Joey McAllister
schedule status chart Alpha Project Status

Design and implement a new call-tracking system.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
Multitasking Is Evil

Multitasking is often seen as a desirable skill—you can buy books or pay to attend courses that will teach you how to do it—but it is a surprisingly debilitating idea.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
 Code Consistency with Scope Guards A ''D'' in Programming, Part 1

In certain company, the topic of favorite programming languages can elicit the same response as other taboo subjects, such as religion and politics. But, Chuck's going out on a limb to discuss his new favorite language, D, and some of its best features, such as its being strongly typed and compiling to native code, yet it is garbage collected.

Chuck Allison's picture Chuck Allison
SDLC phases and activities Requirements Engineering: Our Best Practices

This article focuses on a methodology adopted during a requirements and functional specification phase of a project. The chosen model for requirements engineering was founded on a combination of six sigma techniques and a set of best practices adopted from within the organization.

Bonney Joseph
Agile Strategies for Geographically Distributed Quality Management

Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management.

Scott W. Ambler's picture Scott W. Ambler
Don't Let the Engine Run out of Fuel

Clarke Ching's friend Gary is one of those quietly clever people who hated school, so he left as soon as he could to go work in a factory. Nowadays, years after their schoolboy days in New Zealand, Clarke works in Europe as a management consultant and Gary owns and runs a small farm in New Zealand. Their lives couldn't be more different, yet Gary taught Clarke one of the most valuable lessons Clarke has learned during his career. In this article, Clarke describes that lesson and how it has changed his approach toward dealing with customers and key players in developing a product.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
one way to categorize and organize questions Capturing Implied Requirements

Sometimes the user, project sponsor, and other key stakeholders haven't provided in the requirements documentation all the expectations of the software you're building. Instead, these expectations are only implied. In a perfect requirements-gathering process, there would be no such thing as an "implied requirement" because every requirement would be captured in the document. But no process is perfect, in theory or in practice. This article should help you look for and recognize the presence of implied requirements and learn how to capture them and convert them to documented requirements.

Robert Rose-Coutre's picture Robert Rose-Coutre
budget table Using Earned Value Management for Improving Processes

This article explains earned value management and explores how the metric can be used to improve project and business processes.

Cynthia K. West

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