Even with pages of documentation, there still can be miscommunication and misguided assumptions about a product. A prototype serves as the vision for the product and helps everyone, from a salesperson to an engineer, understand what they are trying to achieve. This article looks at some of the benefits of prototyping early in the development process.

The death spiral supersedes the death march in that the death march is a singular event, whereas the death spiral is systemic. It is the result of organizational dysfunction where teams march toward deadline after deadline without reflecting on or questioning if there is a better way to deliver software. There is! Take these positive steps.

Testing application performance prior to release is an essential part of managing risk in any software project. But the budget must be considered when talking performance testing; you want to know what it is going to cost to build and maintain a system that supports the project goals. However, there are ways to test the performance of your project while keeping the effort to a manageable set of tasks that get the job done without breaking the bank.

There are ever-growing ways to organize your project assets with public domain configuration management tools. There's a mistaken belief that these free software configuration management (SCM) alternatives can be just as powerful as leading commercial tools.