Application Lifecycle Management

With all the hype about agile, lean, CMMI®, and every other method du jour, we sometimes forget that our real goal is high performance. High-performance software teams consistently deliver products that delight their customers, all while remaining on schedule, keeping with agreed-to functionality, and maintaining high quality. These teams are proud of what they produce and are continuously improving the way they work. Over the past decade, Noopur Davis has worked with many high-performance teams in both large and small organizations. She has discovered that high-performance teams share a number of key practices, regardless of the process they use. Noopur shares these effective practices, including self-direction, openness and transparency, simplicity of work practices, focused use of data, an uncompromising commitment to quality, and others.

Turbulent weather such as tornados is characterized by chaotic, random, and often surprising and powerful pattern changes. Similarly, turbulent software projects are characterized by chaotic, seemingly random project changes that happen unexpectedly and with force. Dealing with turbulence is about dealing with change. Testing teams must contend with continuously changing project requirements, design, team members, business goals, technologies, and organizational structures. Test managers and leaders should not just react to change; instead, they need to learn how to read the warning signs of coming change and seek to discover the source of impending changes. Rob Sabourin shares his experiences organizing projects for testing in highly turbulent situations. Learn how to identify context drivers and establish active context listeners in your organization.

Many software development organizations have a Quality Assurance (QA) component. Often, QA is just an impressive name for "we do some testing before rolling out our product." True QA encompasses an integrated process that guides software development from inception to delivery using approaches such as CMMI®, Six Sigma, and ISO. The software testing that occurs near the end of a software development process is a separate, standalone activity that assesses "fitness for use" before delivery. Dawn Haynes explains the differences between quality measures and software requirements with an interactive exercise. She discusses ways for you to evaluate and measure progress toward quality goals during development and explores ways to build management support and develop a skilled QA team. So, if you're not implementing a truly formal QA program, come see what you are missing.

Agile software development presents an appealing array of possibilities for building better software-customer focused development, high team communication, frequent releases of production-ready software, and early lifecycle testing. Unfortunately, many organizations who have attempted to develop software using agile methods have not been very successful at transitioning to an agile process. Often, the organization attempts to change too much of its software process too quickly. Jeffery Payne describes an approach to incrementally improve the agility of your organization's software process while continuing to achieve your software delivery goals. Jeffery describes high value agile management and agile development methods-including daily stand-ups, continuous integration, pair programming, and test-driven development-and then prioritizes these approaches by their impact on the organization.