Software product success.
Seriously.
There’s a crazy deal being offered by Axosoft. Buy a 5-user version of their $500 software suite for $5, but the offer expires February 24th. The link to buy the software is here – and only available on blogs. Axosoft is trying a social marketing experiment to see if they can promote their products and brand via the blog universe. It isn’t clear at what hour the offer expires, so you might want to get it on the 23rd.
Should we test our software? Should we test it more?
The answer to the first question is almost invariably yes. The answer to the second question is usually “I don’t know.”
We write a lot about the importance of testing. We have several other posts in our series on software testing. How do we know when we should do more automated testing?
Developing great software requirements demands iteration
In our previous post of an example of the software development process, we showed a linear flow through the process, as depicted in several posts over a couple weeks. What we failed to show was any of the iteration cycles, as Deepak points out by asking a great question in the comments on that post. In this post, we will show a little more about how the process works by showing how iteration fits into the machinery of software development.
We’ve presented an example of the software development process across several posts over the last two weeks. In this post we tie them all together, showing the steps in process order.
The Lost Garden has an outstanding post by Danc – Software Development’s Evolution towards Product Design.
Danc writes about how the software development process has evolved over the years. He characterizes this evolution in four distinct phases.
This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.
Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.
Prioritizing software requirements
Jason at 37 signals recently posted about essential vs non-essential requirements – the software equivalent of Am I hot or not? He talks about the prioritization decisions their team went through as part of bringing Campfire to it’s launch. Campfire is an online collaboration application that just launched today. We will talk about how their prioritization
Our previous post, Requirements vs design – which is which and why, describes our position on which parts of the software development process are requirements-activities, and which parts are design activities. The debate among professionals about these distinctions is ongoing, and continues in the comments on that post. The length of the debate, combined with the skills of those debating demonstrates that it isn’t a black and white issue.
In this post, we will try and explore the reasons why this debate is ongoing. We will do that by exploring the symbolism of the terms involved, as well as the roles of different members of the software development team.
A classic debate. It comes up often. Unfortunately, it’s a source of confusion that causes many teams to shy away from staffing, creating, or managing any formal requirements processes. There’s a discussion on Seilevel’s forum where this has been brought up again, and it’s shaping up to be a fine grudge match here in Austin. We can’t let the other folks have all the fun, so we’ll chime in too.