Karl E. Wiegers

Software projects are complex endeavors that rely on clear communication for success. If communication methods are mismatched or leave too many gaps, your project could suffer, and you could be highly frustrated. In this column, Karl Wiegers details potential problems to be mindful of, and strategies to use, when communicating about a project.

Is your organization doing Extreme Programming or one of the other agile methods? Are they considering it? Before you jump on the latest methodology bandwagon, you should make sure you're not just giving your developers a license to hack. Karl Wiegers provides some insight into how agile development models can be misused and how you can ensure that your process improvement effort has the best chance to be effective.

When your team members are separated by space or time, don’t abandon peer reviews. They can still be powerful contributors to product quality and team productivity. In this adaptation from his forthcoming book, Karl Wiegers spells out how to engage the team in distributed review meetings or asynchronous reviews. Although they aren’t the same as sitting down face-to-face, these techniques provide a valuable alternative mechanism for getting a little help from your friends.

The slick brochure promises every feature you can imagine, and the sales rep assures you that his package will do just what your users want. But that's what the other vendor's sales rep said, too. Sound familiar? Karl Wiegers recommends several requirements development practices that can help you select the right commercial package solution. Key practices include identifying user classes, defining their use cases, creating test cases from the high-priority use cases, documenting pertinent business rules, and exploring the users' performance goals and other quality attributes.

This article describes seven common ways that technical reviews go wrong. Symptoms of the problem and suggestions for getting the review back on track also are presented.