Better Software Magazine Articles

Measuring Process Improvement

Tracking your project goals lets you know how well your improvement program is going, provides visibility early to detect problems, and gives you data to make your future plans more effective. Here's how to measure improvement based on your project's goals and problems.

Mary Sakry
Outsourcing: What to Consider When Supplementing Your Test and QA Capabilities

Companies outsource for a variety of reasons, with a variety of expectations. This article describes ways outsourcing can be successful, and reasons outsourcing may fail. This is an in-depth article that sets the stage and discusses numerous scenarios.

Jim Bampos
At Your Service

A light and effective process with a service-oriented philosophy is key to meeting your organization's needs. Here are eight simple steps for creating a software engineering team that will turn customers into fans.

Robert Sabourin's picture Robert Sabourin
Meaningful Metrics

Your numbers are solid and your graphs are works of art. Now boost your metrics' value through the roof with some simple annotations that will put all that data in context.

Anna S. W. Allison
How Good Is This Software?—A Model to Measure Subjective Data

How do you really know how good your software is? Many traditional measures only look at the quantitative aspects of quality. Here's a model to measure and analyze subjective—or qualitative—data about software quality.

Andy Roth
Matching ISO 9000 Registration to Your Organization

The chances of getting use from your ISO 9000 certification are greatly enhanced by a registration effort that reflects the real goals and operating principles of your organization. Here are some lessons on how to tailor your effort.

Mark Johnson
Can You Negotiate Quality?

XP teams have the right to do their best work. On the other hand, customers have the right to specify and pay for only the quality they need. How does one reconcile two potentially conflicting points of view? Is quality negotiable? If so, how do we go about negotiating it? This paper will explore the following questions: Is quality negotiable? How can we negotiate quality? What are internal and external quality, and are either or both negotiable? What's the XP tester's quality assurance role? How far should testers go in helping the customer define acceptance criteria?

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin

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