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Documentation Metrics

"It is inevitable that sooner or later, someone higher up the food chain is going to ask you for documentation metrics." In this article, Donald Le Vie distinguishes between "mechanical metrics" that don't really measure your productivity, and "quality metrics," which are more difficult to use, but much more accurate. Le Vie provides excellent examples of these, and analyzes the value of various types of metrics.

This article reprinted with permission from INTERCOM, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication (STC).

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
clean user interface The "Data" in Data-Driven Silk Testing

This article relates the benefits of data-driven testing. It will describe how we approached data-driven testing with SILKTest, what tools we used to generate the data, and the results.

Steve Pearson
7 Keys to Building Great Work Teams

Successful projects depend on how well the team works together. Elements that lead to success include commitment, contribution, good communication, and cooperation. Cooperation itself includes factors such as follow-through, timeliness, and others. Conflict management and change management are also important. This article analyzes and explains all of these elements that constitute a productive and successful team.

Suzanne Willis Zoglio
Test and Decision Theory

In industrial reality, risk is typically assessed by estimating probabilities and consequences. This approach provides only raw data, but does not offer any strategy for decision making. Software testing practitioners are commonly confronted with two decision-making situations: what to test and whether to continue testing. A branch of statistics called decision theory provides a number of concepts and methods that can be used to make better decisions in a structured and controlled way.

Bogdan Bereza-Jarocins
Does Test Automation Save Time and Money?

We've all heard the pitch: test automation saves testing time and resources. Test tools can execute tests faster than a person can, and in most cases they can do so in an unattended mode. So test automation should reduce test cycle time or the number of testers needed. Right? Not exactly. But Linda Hayes will tell you what it does save.

Linda Hayes's picture Linda Hayes
Measuring Performance Against Management Deliverables

Prompted by a comment from our sticky-minded audience, this week Johanna shares some ways test managers can assess their performance against specific management deliverables likely to be high on an organization's priority list.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
What's Wrong with Software Reuse?

In this column, Bob Glass skewers one of the "old wives' tales" of the software field, the theory-based prediction that software reuse will lead to unbounded improvements in both development productivity and software quality. "It ain't so," he says here. But he certainly wishes that it were.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Considerations for Developing Prototype Software

Prototypes are meant to demonstrate the viability of a process or to elicit requirements, but do not result in a sustainable system. In general, prototypes should be built only as a demonstration and replaced with a robust application for the production environment. Developers should take it upon themselves to avoid the proliferation of prototype code and systems.

Peter Gaudet
Configuration Management for Distributed Development

Configuration Management (CM) includes synchronizing and supporting developers in their common development and maintenance of a system. In order to utilize skilled personnel despite geographical location, groups of developers are now working all over the world on the development of common systems, a situation called distributed development. This article discusses the different cases and architectures with respect to distributed development and their demands on Configuration Management Tools. It also presents the features of some currently available CM tools that support Distributed Development.

Nina RajKumar
Enterprise Strategy for Nurturing Reusable Components

This paper explains how to identify good reusable components and describes a strategy for maintaining reusable components.

VijayShankar Athmalingam

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