Extreme Programming (XP) is all the buzz these days. Business' motivation is to decrease time-to-market, maximizing revenue opportunities. Without quality practices that keep pace, new releases deliver defects just as quickly! Quality testing also often fails to provide complete identification of the launch risk, making enterprises vulnerable upon launch. Often there's no time to test, and automation doesn't seem to shorten time-to-market. Jim explains how he escaped this dilemma at Egreetings.com, a top 50 website.

You're a quality assurance professional working for a dot-com and everything you do violates the best practices with which you're familiar. Requirements are minimal or even non-existent. The test cycle is so short there is no time to write a plan or develop a test strategy. Most of the testing is ad hoc. How do you ensure a high quality product and still maintain your sanity in this environment?

Negative mindsets and instances are so easy to fall into, and it can be difficult to see the positive in things. By using the "temperature reading" technique, a completely attitude and outlook turnaround time can be achieved in very little time. Learn this easy method for improving your mindset.

You have an approved project that is about to begin - the project team is in place, the product owner has been identified - the stakeholders are eagerly waiting to see results of this agile approach that they have all heard good things about ...

Here's your dilemma ... the stakeholders are expecting to see tangible progress at the end of the first iteration in two or three weeks - having been through presentations of Agile processes. But you know that it's really not feasible to deliver anything remotely useful in that short a period. Agile processes warrant early delivery of business value, stressing on working code. Release planning and iteration planning are all based around user stories completed to the extent of being ready to deploy. But the reality is often different.