Better Software Articles

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Calculating the Value of Testing

From an executive's perspective, software testing is not a capital investment in the physical plant, an acquisition, or another readily accepted business expense. A Quality Assurance Manager describes how to present testing as a business-process investment.

James Bullock
Bringing Your Test Data to Life

Tracking test results is one of the fundamental tasks that your software testing organization must perform to be successful. Explore how a customized database can enhance that process.

Len DiMaggio
Estimating Time, Effort, and Cost

Correctly judging project needs and scope is a challenging task. Here are some techniques and tools for accurately predicting project deliverables.

David Garmus
Extreme Testing

Rapid application development means you have to accept that the things you build will need to change. Approach development in a way that makes it easy to transform yesterday’s code into what you need tomorrow. This article explains how testing works in the world of Extreme Programming.

Ronald E. Jeffries
Collaborate for Quality

Project teams are searching for ways to develop requirements that are as free from defects as possible. Here's how you can use collaborative workshops, along with walkthroughs and QA checklists, to develop high-quality requirements.

Ellen Gottesdiener's picture Ellen Gottesdiener
What's With These Buffer Overrun Bugs?

Many of the culprits responsible for security breaches found on corporate networks and the Internet today have used buffer overrun problems as the main way to exploit the system. Here is an examination of buffer overrun bugs and how to prevent them.

Bob Johnson
Keys to Setting Achievable Goals

David Schmaltz identifies five types of goals—aspirations, constraints, regulators, targets, and legacies—and shows how to find common understanding and create meaningful objectives in team projects.

David A. Schmaltz
Build It or Buy It?

When software professionals need a tool to support their work, a common dilemma is whether to build the necessary tool or purchase it. Here's a look at the benefits, risks, and myths associated with each approach.

Elisabeth Hendrickson's picture Elisabeth Hendrickson
Case Study: Selling the CMM

Envision a slow day, a slow meeting, and someone says in a nonchalant manner something like, "Raise your hand if you want to do a CMM." Only two hands go up—but it makes a difference whose hands. From this casual setting develops an all-out effort involving hundreds of people in training, implementing, and integrating the CMM into the development culture. Here is the story of how one large financial services company mobilized for its CMM initiative.

J. James Jacobsen
Finding the Signal through the Noise

A major challenge for software professionals interpreting data is deciding what's real and what isn't, what matters and what doesn't. A useful way to think about it is that you are trying to find the signal in the noise produced by random variation and error. Here is advice on how to extract the useful information from the "noise."

Jarrett Rosenberg

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