Design thinking points out several missed steps in software development. And, while some may believe ideation and iteration to be wasteful, they're easy to add to the development process at low cost and, in the end, result in substantially more valuable software. In this article, Jeff Patton describes the four basic steps of design thinking.

This paper summarizes conclusions from a three year study about why released software fails. Our method was to obtain mature-beta or retail versions of real software applications and stress test them until they fail. From an analysis of the casual faults, we have synthesized four reasons why software fails. This note presents these four classes of failures and discusses the challenges they present to developers and testers. The implications for software testers are emphasized.

Subtle but catastrophic bugs, such as those that cause server crashes and database record-lock race conditions, often only reveal themselves during performance, stress, volume, data quality, and reliability testing. Such testing is most effectively performed in test environments-hardware, software, network, and release configurations-that mimic as nearly as possible the field environment, because test results in less-complex settings often do not extrapolate due to the non-linearity of software. In complex settings, such as Web and e-commerce server and database farms, managing these lab configurations can be quite challenging. This paper presents a basic Access database, designed using the Entity-Relationship technique, that will allow the Test Manager to plan, configure, and maintain this test environment through the test project.

The PERF (Process Enhancement Request Form) template was created to promote continuous process improvement. Anyone in the organization can submit a PERF to add, change, or remove anything having to do with processes.