Laura Rose

Member for

20 years 10 months

Laura Rose has been in the software and testing industry for over 20 years. She's worked with such companies as IBM, Ericsson, Staples, Fidelity Investments and Sogeti in various client advocacy and project management roles. The techniques she uses in her business coaching and client advocacy work saved these companies both time and money, which resulted in on-time, quality product delivery with higher client satisfaction. Laura now uses her client focus, project, quality and people management skills in her personal life coaching career. As a certified coach, she helps people integrate their goals and dreams into their everyday lives. Laura uses creative and practical tools to help her clients realize what really matters to them. They then follow-through with project and time management techniques to create the reality they really want.

Laura authors many articles and workshops on time management and strategic scheduling. She is also the founder of the electronic magazine the Rose Garden: the Art of Becoming. Laura offers one-on-one career and life coaching, small group coaching, seminars and workshops. You can learn more about her at www.rosecoaching.info and contact her at [email protected].

Company

IBM Rational Softwar

Industry

Manufacturing - Utilities - Communications (Non-computer)

Interests

Configuration Management

Defect or Incident Management

Measurement and Estimating

Process Improvement

Requirements

Reviews and Inspections

Software Testing

Country

United States

Laura Rose

All Articles by Laura Rose

All Stories by Laura Rose

	Simple Word Substitution to Increase Your Reliability and ProfessionalismWe may try to fool ourselves into softening our time commitments in hopes that others will be unable to "hold us to them." But relying on ambiguous and vague words to mask delays is self-sabotaging. We may not even realize that we are doing this. It may have become our default mode or habit of speech. The simple fact is that when we speak in doubtful terms, we invite subterfuge, confusion, dissatisfaction and distrust. It may be hard to imagine that a few simple word substitutions can exponentially enhance our reliability and professionalism. In this article, Laura Rose doesn't suggest we spend more time talking and less time listening or that we use ten words when five would do. She suggests we simply avoid ambiguous and vague terms.
	Inappropriate Heroes At least once we've all thought to ourselves, "If I want it done right, I need to do it myself." If the thought crosses your mind frequently at work and you want to change your mindset, then read this article which contains quick tips to avoid creating the mental trap.
	A Leader Among FollowersWe hear that for an effective organization to smoothly evolve and develop there should only be one leader and many followers. The reality is that the majority of most organizations are followers. Since an effective follower is critical to an organization and its ability to accomplish a mission, this article discusses what makes an effective follower.
	Warriors of QA: Part 1Let's face it: Software testers are constantly in a state of warfare, figuratively speaking. There's a tug of war between resources and the amount of work that needs to be done. We struggle against time. We juggle between finding defects and validating fixes. In short, we are warriors, and it's the high performing testers who are successful in battle. In this article, I will consider Sun Tsu ancient strategies in his book The Art of War and apply them to the realm of the high performing software test engineer. These same fundamental principles define our best means for success on the battle field, in the board room, or in the development labs.
	Roadtrip! A Vacationer's Guide to Iterative Development The iterative and incremental development process is built on the work of Barry Boehm's spiral model, and it has been enhanced by many individuals and organizations, including the IBM Rational team, over the past two decades. Even though iterative and incremental development methods have proved highly successful for both large and small development organizations, many still believe that iterative development does not work. While it is human nature to be skeptical of the unknown and untried, many, if not most, of us have implemented something very similar to the iterative development lifecycle in our life outside the software development arena. That is, we've taken a lengthy car trip across country–many of us more than once. This paper illustrates how iterative development techniques are used in everyday activities such as taking a family vacation.
	Myths and Realities of Iterative TestingIn the realm of software development, myths can make it difficult to approach real-world problems objectively thus putting budgets and schedules at increased risk. In this article, Laura Rose questions and debunks some of the most widely held myths pertaining to iterative development in general and iterative testing in particular. She'll also explain how iterative development principles can address these common misunderstandings and lead us to a pragmatic testing methodology that mitigates or avoids altogether many common software development pitfalls--some of which our "mythology" holds as inevitable.
	White Paper: Involving Customers Early and Often In this white paper, Laura Rose offers suggestions for how we can increase the percentage of customer-used features and get early and continuous customer involvement. She provides examples of common, problem scenarios based on her personal experience in software development projects. Although these examples illustrate a software development lifecycle, the techniques she describes can be used by anyone responsible for verifying and gathering requirements.
	Twelve Tips for Realistic Scheduling Whether you're managing a software development project, or coordinating your children's soccer and dance lessons, schedules are helpful tools for orchestrating a sequence of events. Most schedules involve a start and end-date, and include tasks, task duration, and dependencies between tasks. But no matter how well you plan for a series of events, unexpected events will compete for time and threaten deadlines. People you hadn't anticipated will step into your plans, and begin to influence, control, and often complicate things. When we do not handle unexpected events and the interpersonal elements well, our schedules fall apart. Good scheduling is very difficult, a combination of art and science. In this article, I will discuss realistic scheduling, which seeks to cover all the above types of events--the planned, the possible, and the unimagined. There are some techniques that can help you keep your sanity, which go beyond the notes, checklists, milestones dates, and appointment books.