Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)

How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined effort. Learn how the situation can be improved, realizing positive gains in this habitually entrenched process.

Quality versus quantity

Qualitative decisions often lose out to quantitative decisions. Every one of us lives this every day, quite often without realizing that we are doing it. It’s not enough to define our process or methodology and let it settle in. Yes, we absolutely need to have a clearly defined and adopted set of processes and procedures. But at the same time, it’s important to never let it become too rote.

What do you mean, SQA isn’t testing?

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) and Structured Software Testing (SST) are completely different fields. Every single book on the topic (textbooks, course materials, you name it) make this clear. In fact, most emphasize how important it is that these fields be completely separate. Consider:

Quality Assurance is responsible for auditing and ensuring all aspects of work meet [...]

The case against releasing early

In Releasing Early Is Not Always Good? Heresy! author Jason Cohen discusses the reasoning behind “release early” and the argument against. He points out the pitfalls of the rapid-development-early-release paradigm, and introduces a few practical ideas to avoid them. While I don’t agree with all his points (and would add many of my own), it’s [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Don’t ship broken software

There are two kinds of organizations: Those that ship faulty software, and those that don’t. Unfortunately, trying to change from one that does ship faulty software to one that does not is nearly impossible—in fact, I’ll go so far as to say it doesn’t happen to any significant degree. Yet at the same time, organizations [...]

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.