people management

In most projects, testers are the keepers of quality. Sharing the vision of quality with the entire team helps everyone involved in a project play a more active role in determining the state of quality in a product. In this column, Jeff Patton shares several innovative ideas he's seen in practice lately that have helped an entire team own up to the quality of its software.

Before you schedule or moderate another retrospective meeting, read this column by Esther Derby. Esther offers five tips that will help improve the productiveness of retrospective meetings. You'll also learn how letting the meeting participants run the conversation will solicit more feedback and ownership than traditional moderation methods.

If you hear that someone doesn't have "both oars in the water," you know he's out of control, he doesn't "get it," or he's going in circles. Why? To move forward in a rowboat, you need both oars in the water to steer and to gain speed. In this week's column, Mary Gorman explains how this concept applies to modeling requirements.

Managing an agile project based on uncensored "Very High," "High," and "Low Priority" user stories or backlog items used to induce stress on Jeff Patton. So he learned to implement a combination of prioritization techniques to get these lists--and the job--under control. In this week's column, find out how Jeff utilizes MoSCoW and business goals to make sense of prioritization.