Your clients may not understand why you follow certain practices as a project professional. They may encourage you to take shortcuts that they believe will save time, money, and difficulty. You know better, but how can you convince them?

While everything should be done to avoid project failure, it does occur. When it does, management and the team must look into why a project failed, to avoid repeating mistakes in the future. Failure must be more than simply accepted or allowed. It also needs to be closely analyzed.

We need to test infrastructure upgrades carefully to avoid disruptions to our applications—whether still under development or running in production. A good regression test suite can do most of what’s needed, but what if you don’t have one? You can take the time to create a new regression suite, but consultant Fiona Charles recommends an alternative: Use a cross-functional team approach to identify and target upgrade risks directly.

Test automation can turn into a real pain in the neck if a designated team is in charge of it or if the automators work on it as a separate project. In this article, Lisa Crispin seconds Bob Jones’s recent call for whole-team test automation and elaborates on the dangers of relegating test automation to an isolated project rather than integrating it into the overall software development process.