Archive of Foundation series Articles

One of the most common mistakes people make when looking at data is to jump to conclusions about the data. We all live in a world of cause and effect. It is only natural that when we see data that appears to show cause and effect, we assume that it does. But it often doesn’t. This article shows the difference between cause and effect relationships and correlated data.

Utility is an abstract concept usually relegated to economics. What is it? How does it work?

Inbound product manager or outbound product manager - what’s the difference? We’ll look at the overall role, and the breakdown of responsibilities. We also follow-up with some suggested detailed reading.

JAD is an acronym that stands for Joint Application Design. JAD sessions are collaborative meetings where the customers meet with developers to determine what the product needs to be or do.

What is a data dictionary and how is it used when communicating and managing requirements?

Use cases represent the activities that people do when interacting with a system to achieve their goals. Use cases are a very effective tool for communicating and documenting what a system is intended to accomplish. Formal use cases are use cases that use a specific structure to represent the information. Knowing how to read a formal use case is important.

Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.

Continuous Integration is the software development and quality process where all team members merge their code and verifies it frequently - at least daily. This verification project includes both an automated build process and automated testing. The main benefits of continuous integration come from risk-reduction and cost-reduction.

PERT is a technique for providing definitive estimates of how long it will take to complete tasks. We often estimate, or scope, the amount of time it will take us to complete a task or tasks. PERT allows us to provide not only an estimate, but a measure of how good the estimate is. Good estimates are a critical element in any software planning strategy. In this post, we will present an introduction to using PERT, explain how it works and how to interpret PERT estimates.

Feature driven development (FDD) is one of several agile methodologies for developing software iteratively. Iterative development is the opposite of waterfall development. FDD is a process that begins with high level planning to define the scope of the project, which then moves into incremental delivery. Each increment of delivery involves a design phase and an implementation phase. The scope of each increment is a single feature. Extreme programming (XP) is a much better known agile methodology. XP is often described as an emergent design process, in that no one knows what the finished product is going to be until the product is finished. FDD, by comparison, defines the overall scope of the project at the beginning, but does not define the details.