Rex Black

Some managers use "management by objectives" effectively; however, too often they are used destructively and undermine the team. In this article Rex gives the clarion call to stop the bad MBOs and gives three case studies of what not to do.

It's 2003, and you're a manager casting about for a good New Year's resolution. Sure, going to the gym, quitting cigarettes, cutting down on the cheeseburgers-those are all good resolutions for you personally. But how about a resolution that helps you professionally, and will help everyone who works for you? How about resolving to stop destroying your team with bad MBOs? Find out how, in this week's column by Rex Black.

Pervasive testing means getting the right people working together through the right processes at the right time for high-ROI testing. Through pervasive testing, all the ideas we've explored so far come together.Web site (as of late-July 2002).

Before we can build a high-fidelity test system, we have to understand what quality means to our customers. Test professionals can avail themselves of three powerful techniques for analyzing risks to system quality. Targeting our testing investment by increasing effort for those areas most at risk results in the highest return on investment.

Realizing a solid return on your testing investment requires smart selection of tests. Cost-of-quality analysis tells us that it's cheaper to find and fix bugs before the customers do, but, to keep bugs away from customers, we have to find the ones that matter.

Information appliances, which provide simplified, easy access to specific information such as email and Web sites, promise to bring the benefits of computing to a wide customer base, including some computer-averse people who have hitherto avoided buying a computer. What does "quality" mean in such a device and how can we assess it? This paper presents the test team's findings on one such project.

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.