Office politics are a fact of life in the workplace, but they sometimes spill over and affect employees' lives outside the office as well. In this tale by Leonidas Hepis, office politics endanger a QA team member's work and her family time.

All projects begin with a great deal of uncertainty. Mike Cohn takes a look at Alexander Laufer’s concepts of means and end uncertainties and explains why an iterative approach to product development is the best way to be certain your users get what they want.

Software estimation is more of a dance than a science. To help you avoid tripping during the estimation waltz, Karl Wiegers presents five safety tips in this week's column. They might not help you generate perfect estimates, but they address estimation realities that might keep you out of trouble.

Long-time advocate of status reports, Johanna Rothman has come across a new way of reporting the movement of a project using something we experience everyday—the weather. In this column, she sheds a little sunshine on this new technique, which demonstrates the status of a project a lot like meteorologists announce current weather conditions.