Project Management
Articles
Where's Charlie?! Are you inadvertently setting up a one-dimensional team? Managers regularly make statements to recruiters like, "I need another test engineer just like Charlie." Sometimes hiring people with very similar qualifications makes sense, but sometimes breaking the mold makes a better team. |
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A Tester’s Tips for Dealing with Developers Is the tester doing a good job or a bad job when she proves that the program is full of bugs? It’s a bad job from some developers’ points of view. Ridiculous as it seems, there are project managers blaming testers for the late shipment of a product and developers complaining (often jokingly) that “the testers are too tough on the program.” Obviously, there is more to successful testing than bug counts. Here are some tips about how testers can build successful relationships with developers. |
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Use Case Completion Worksheet (template) This use case template will help you keep track of changes and the disposition of use cases during a requirements workshop. |
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A Problematic Truth "No Fred, we're not considering you for that promotion. You're too valuable where you are." How many of us have heard those words, or said them at least once to our staff? Sometimes, we use the "too valuable" phrase to avoid discussing problems with a staff member, problems you can bring out in the open and manage. |
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A Child's-Eye View of Software Testing You've had to explain and justify your job to Management, to Human Resources, and to everyone at your high school reunion. But now comes the ultimate test: Your child's assignment for the next show-and-tell is to describe what her mom or dad does for a living. You scramble for an easy way to explain—maybe for the first time—what you do at the office, but your software testing reference books just don't have enough pictures of cute animals to really do the trick. This book might be just what you're looking for. |
Alyn Wambeke
January 23, 2001 |
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What Is Exploratory Testing? Exploratory software testing is a powerful and fun approach to testing. In some situations, it can be orders of magnitude more productive than scripted testing. I haven't found a tester yet who didn't, at least unconsciously, perform exploratory testing at one time or another. Yet few of us study this approach, and it doesn't get much respect in our field. It's high time we stop the denial, and publicly recognize the exploratory approach for what it is: scientific thinking in real time. Friends, that's a good thing. |
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When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get...Gentle? Software projects are filled with productivity needs and deadline pressures. As a project manager, you may feel responsible for project deliverables yet highly dependent on others to complete their work. It's common to push, prod, and heavy-handedly coerce your team to go faster. Sometimes this has the desired effect. And even if it doesn't, you can at least claim you pushed as hard as you could. But is that really all that can be done? Eileen Strider suggests another tool at your disposal. |
Eileen Strider
January 11, 2001 |
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T-shirts Are Not Enough Watching the recent Olympic teams in their matching uniforms reinforced the value of connecting with your team. What other gear might your team need? I'm not sure where we got the idea that T-shirts were enough. Are we too arrogant to admit that sometimes a bulletproof vest would be handy? |
Eileen Strider
November 10, 2000 |
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Running Down Assumptions Do you think the assumptions you make about your software project are important? I do. One of the biggest sources of software project failure is hidden assumptions, especially about your requirements. These assumptions have a way of coming out of the woodwork–usually at the worst possible moment–to foil your projects. But there are ways to track down and expose assumptions. |
Brian Lawrence
November 3, 2000 |
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Shhhhhh! You Can't Say That! Treating symptoms instead of the root cause of symptoms is a mistake that dates back millennia (just ask Socrates). The current-day workplace is no different. In Johanna Rothman's column, we get a glimpse at what happens when a company doesn't value its people. |