The Latest

Software projects are like stud poker hands-all have great potential at the beginning, additional information becomes available as they progress, and it's hard to remain detached from the emotion of the game.

Software managers, project leaders, and developers often complain that "Management" sets unreasonable schedules for delivery of software projects.

Get the software engineering slant on items from the recent news.
 

All year long we've been asking people in every phase of the software development lifecycle to tell us what quality means to them. We found that while most agree on what quality is, there's still controversy over how to achieve it.

When the schedule is tight, testing often gets squeezed. You could gnash your teeth and rail against the unfairness of it all. You could doggedly test until you run out of time. But maybe it would be better to plan for change up front with a flexible, prioritized test plan. Find out how to decide what to leave in and what to leave out.

We should use project postmortems to improve our software process. But few teams do, and fewer teams reliably learn from project postmortems. You can introduce postmortems to your team easily with a timeline postmortem process. If you are already doing postmortems, a timeline-based approach may improve your results.
This process:

• Takes little time (a few hours).
• Has a high degree of software engineer acceptance.
• Provides immediate feedback into your development process.
• Increases team cohesion and rapport.
• Reduces finger pointing.

Fashioning a new requirements method is an almost impossible task, given budget and time constraints. But that doesn't mean you have to be stuck with an ill-fitting process. Learn about seven alterations that almost any organization can make.