So you think you’re following Scrum?

I have a prediction. If you take the Nokia “Scrum Test” you are going to score somewhere less than 7. That means you aren’t doing Scrum, you’re doing “ScrumButt:”
A ScrumButt is a sort of like Scrum implementation… but some changes that were too painful have been left out… Companies in this category tend to only [...]

Exposing the enterprise to risk: Who decides what not to test?

Testing, testing, testing. In a recent article by John Parkinson (Strong Signals, CIO Insight magazine) the value of testing is raised on par with the activity of design and coding itself:
Testing is becoming as necessary a profession as design and coding. Skills and experience matter. Process matters. Tools matter. Let the tests begin.

Our systems are [...]

Software cost estimation: Where’s the silver bullet?

Recently Kirk Gray wrote a piece — more of a plea really — titled Software Estimation is Hard. The problem at hand is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet that delivers accurate software project cost estimation. Software cost estimation (and here, I mean “cost” in the sense of effort, time and money) [...]

Whole teams

An operational, successful team is more than a set of interchangeable, anonymized skill sets. Would you buy a car that had never been tested in a safety lab? Of course not, and yet the software industry, particularly the commercial industry (as compared to Military, for example) has been ploughing along without whole teams for decades–a trend that seems to be getting more and more negative attention.

Formal inspections: An introduction

The price of software problems is very high: As much as 50% of development and 100% of all maintenance costs can be attributed to software defects. Often, this price becomes apparent late in the software life cycle—quite often after the software has reached its operational phase (after the software ships)—as previously undetected defects are discovered [...]

Quality assurance as a way of life

Managing software quality is not simply creating a test program during a late-phase testing period. In fact, addressing quality assurance in this way is too little, too late. This far into the software life cycle, defects have become an intrinsic part of the architecture.

Navigating the methodology maze

Choosing the right tools to get the job done is time consuming. Development process is not a simple, one-size-fits-all equation. Project teams have a wide array of techniques available to them — but it’s important to remember that its the project, not the manager, that chooses the methodology. Understanding the sometimes subtle and not so subtle variations between methodologies is critical. Choosing a methodology that works for the team and accommodates project needs is, at best, tricky. (Reposted from my original article.)