Agile / Product Management / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Is Agile Bad For Software Development?

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Last week, Ivan Chalif, a product manager / blogger, tapped into a thread criticising product managers for not adopting and espousing agile, or at least rapid-release techniques. In this article we look at Ivan’s comments and one of the articles that he referenced. We also share our own perspective and an alternative analysis of what may have happened.

Agile / Communication / Process Improvement / Project Management / Software development / Testing

Crossing The Desert With Bad Project Planning

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Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?

Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Foundation Series: Continuous Integration

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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.

Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software

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Testing software is more than just manually banging around (also called monkey testing) and trying to break different parts of the software application. Unit testing is testing a subset of the functionality of a piece of software. A unit test is different from a system test in that it provides information only about a particular subset of the software. In our previous Foundation series post on black box and white box testing, we used the inspections that come bundled with an oil change as examples of unit tests.