Software development has been moving toward progressively smaller and faster development cycles, and continuous integration and continuous deployment are compressing delivery times even further. But is this actually good for businesses or their users? Just because you can deploy to production quickly and frequently, should you?

Switching from a legacy system to a composite application can be tricky: The transition will require a lot of restructuring. To be sure you’re conducting the most streamlined, complete transfer possible, focus on key performance indicators. Defining KPIs can help prioritize objectives and create an efficient new workflow.

Counting is easy. However, what makes measurement really valuable-and really hard to get right-is knowing what to count and what to do with the results. If your organization is mostly tracking resource usage, costs, and schedule data, it is making a big mistake. What about the users? The customers? The overall business strategy? Sharing the lessons he has learned from fighting-and surviving-many software measurement battles, Ed Weller offers a step-by-step approach for implementing a practical and valuable metrics program. After understanding what measures are most important to the business strategy and all stakeholders, the next step is to decide what data supports those measures and how to capture it. With data in hand, you can create simple and informative ways to make the resulting metrics visible and easy to digest. The biggest challenges-avoidance, disbelief, and rationalization-come next.

Listening to your customers is absolutely mandatory to ensure their satisfaction and making sure they know you listened to them is just as important. Wayne Goldstein takes a look at how simply resolving an issue a customer brings up isn't always enough. Take a look with him at continuous process improvement from the help desk to releasing the software update to fix a problem.