Archive of Polls Articles

Pragmatic Marketing runs an annual survey of product managers. We looked at 440 results from the 2006 Product Manager Survey to uncover the trends in how different product manager roles are defined. The survey involved questions breaking down the allocation of time to different activities. In this article we look at how those activities varied for product managers, product marketing managers, segment / market managers, and technical product managers.

See what CMMI levels and RMM levels other teams are using. Take a minute out of your day to tell us your CMMI level and RMM level. We all want to know, but we need your help – if you don’t answer, you won’t learn anything. Thanks for clicking through! And check back later to see the results as they come in.

The polls are open! Go to their announcement to take the annual Product Management and Marketing Survey! Then check our our post for links to previous survey results and trends.

[Ed: If you read Tyner Blain via RSS you have to visit the site to vote in the poll. Also, we'll use a camera.]
An earlier post on CRUD use cases started a fantastic debate (both public and private) about what it means to write great software, and if it’s even possible to write good [...]

The top ten use case mistakes
We’re reiterating the top five use case mistakes from Top five use case blunders and adding five more. For details on the first five, go back to that post.
There’s also a poll at the end of this post – vote for the worst mistake.

Inconsistency.
Incorrectness.
Wrong priorities.
Implementation cues.
Broken traceability.
Unanticipated error [...]

Should I use black box testing or white box testing for my software?

You will hear three answers to this question – black, white, and gray. We recently published a foundation series post on black box and white box testing – which serves as a good background document. We also mention greybox (or gray box) testing as a layered approach to combining both disciplines.

Given those definitions, let’s look at the pros and cons of each style of testing.

Blackbox tests and whitebox tests.
These terms get thrown about quite a bit. In a previous post, we referenced Marc Clifton’s advanced unit testing series. If you were already familiar with the domain, his article could immediately build on that background knowledge and extend it.

Software testing can be most simply described as “for a given set of inputs into a software application, evaluate a set of outputs.” Software testing is a cause-and-effect analysis.

The UML way to organize and manage use cases.
Pros

Provides a high level view of the use cases in a system, solution, or application.
Clearly shows which actors perform which use cases, and how use cases combine to form business processes

Cons

Presents an “inside-out” view of the sytem. This description reflects “what it is” not “why it is” [...]

The informal use case is the tool of the Agile Requirements Manager. It is a paragraph describing the user’s goals and steps. Also referred to as a basic use case.

This is the classic use case as described by someone who talks about Software Engineering. All of the training classes (other than Agile classes) that I’ve been to teach formal use case development as a component in a system of requirements management.