development lifecycles

You procrastinate. You worry that you may be making the wrong choice. You spend time on the irrelevant. You don't select the most important tasks from your many "to do's." You can't get things done on time. Join James Martin as he shares his experience with analysis paralysis, procrastination, and failure to deliver what others expect. After a look at why we procrastinate, James turns his attention to his personal story of a "bubble" of super productivity in which he delivered more relevant work in a two-week period than he believed possible. Along with the techniques and tips you would expect from a productivity boosting experience report, James explains the state of mind that will help you distinguish important from trivial tasks, reduce waste in your work, and discover the most important thing to do next. You can get It all done in record time-and with less angst than you ever dreamed possible.

The Internet is full of insecure applications that cost organizations money and time, while damaging their reputations when their systems are compromised. We need to build secure applications as never before, but most developers are not now-and never will be-security specialists. By incorporating security controls into the frameworks used to create applications, Tom Stiehm asserts that any organization can imbue security into its applications. Building security into a framework allows highly specialized security experts to create components that maximize your application security profile while reducing the need for your development teams to have specialized application security knowledge. Learn to pick the right places in your framework to insert security controls and then enforce their use. Join Tom to explore real-world security controls he's applied to commonly used application frameworks.

Risks are endemic in every step of every software project. A well-established key to project success is to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate these risks. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality where test managers and testers can significantly influence the project outcome. Julie Gardiner demonstrates how to evaluate and mitigate product risk from a testing perspective. She describes different approaches to risk management, the benefits of each, and how to use them. With an understanding and appreciation for product risk analysis, the test manager and team can then assess which testing approaches and techniques they should apply to reduce these risks. Julie demonstrates an easy way to report on progress to business management and stakeholders using product risk as its basis.

The question of how much-or how little-design to do up-front on a project often leads to a conundrum. Too much design often results in overkill engineering that results in extra complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that result in extra complexity and wasted effort. So, how can you determine the right balance for a given application or system? Alan Shalloway offers a proven approach to determine how much design work to do before beginning the code-build steps in a project. Alan has learned that the trick is to discover and ponder what you don’t know, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in your code in the simplest way possible.