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Live Blog: Lightning Strikes the Keynotes, STARWEST 2013 On October 2, everyone’s favorite rapid-fire conference session took place. Of course, I’m referring to what is aptly called “Lighting Strikes the Keynotes.” During this keynote, a wide range of conference speakers got five minutes to capture the crowd’s attention with their best ideas and thoughts on all things testing and development.
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Building a Backlog for Legacy System Changes Kent McDonald writes that teams often assume that they cannot split their changes into small stories because the resulting stories would not provide value. What they fail to realize is that they can split these bigger changes into smaller changes and gain value by showing their stakeholders, getting feedback, and incorporating that feedback in their continued development.
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Your Start Affects Your Finish: A Butterfly Effect in Software Development Outsourcing Serhiy Haziyev and Halyna Semenova explain that your start affects your finish. A small but significant detail missed at the beginning of a project may multiply and eventually lead to missed schedules, failed expectations, and mutual dissatisfaction. You need to remember to invest in a preparation phase when outsourcing a project to a third-party organization.
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Risk Management in Hindsight: A Simple Tool for Focused Problem Solving in a Project Retrospective Quality improvement initiatives sometimes have trouble getting traction in organizations because of the perceived formality. In this article, Payson proposes a technique for identifying process improvement that is fast, organic, and will fly under the radar of most skeptics until it has demonstrated its value to the team.
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Seven (Terrible) Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Manage Risks, and Thoughtful Responses to Each of Them Proposing more effective risk management is essentially suggesting a change to the way people do things. Payson Hall explains seven dismissive remarks you might encounter if you propose increased risk-management rigor.
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Testing Tradeoffs and Project Risk: A Case Study Between extreme opinions of what is testing “overkill” and what is “essential,” there sometimes exists a reasonable middle path. In this field report, Payson identifies an example of risk mitigation and the evolution of the analysis that brought him there.
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Driving Efficiency and Effectiveness with Web Analytics and Risk-Based Testing Web analytics can help you deduce, reduce, and prioritize your testing efforts. Learn how to gather and use qualitative and quantitative information about your users and the risks that can threaten your software's success.
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Dear Customer: The Truth about IT Projects In this personal and direct letter to customers, Allan Kelly pulls no punches and explains why IT projects don't always pan out for all of the parties involved.
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I’ve Got Your Back Having similar motivations and processes may help to establish a team, but you and your coworkers won’t be the best teammates you can be until you also have each other’s back. Here, Johanna Rothman and Gil Broza describe valuable approaches to whole-team support, including banking trust and building shared responsibility.
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Thoughts from Mid-Project My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.
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