StickyMinds

Keeping your team busy with work all of the time may seem good for productivity and a good use of your work force. But it come with serious backlash in the form of delayed work, incomplete iterations, technical debt, and the negative consequences of multitask context switching. In this column, Johanna Rothman explains how teams should focus on throughput and not the conceived benefit of 100 percent utilization.

An effective Quality Assurance (QA) organization must have ARMS (the organization’s ability to perform certain measurement Activities, understand the activity’s Relevance to the software quality model, know the type of Metrics to collect, and create Synergy with adjacent organizations). This thesis focuses on the difficulty in obtaining measurement and explores whether or not QA organizational design can make it easier to measure certain characteristics of software quality.

This book by Gerard M. Hill is written for project managers who already possess a basic level of competency in project management. The book is an excellent shelf reference and provides the tools on a companion CD, which are needed to begin implementing your own project management methodology.

When I first started reading this book, I noticed a few, unique things. First, it’s more of a workbook than a regular technology book. Second, a "cheat sheet" list of important facts and information to which you might need quick access are provided on the front- and back-inside covers. I just started using Ruby, so I learned a lot as I read along. There are a lot of examples of code in the book that are useful to a new user such as myself.

When your customers aren't complaining about the services you provide, it's easy to assume you have happy customers. But that could be a serious mistake. In this week's column, Naomi Karten describes what happened in two organizations that misinterpreted the absence of customer complaints.

Authors Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher combine organizational tasks like technical knowledge, business process management, and people management in order to build a scalable organization and IT architecture that meets the current demands and future growth of customers. They cover architecture, processes, and organizations in a way that reaches out to every segment of professionals in the information technology field.

As the title suggests, this material is mostly geared towards technical readers with engineering backgrounds. Readers in management and business process roles could also benefit, but may utilize the material in a different manner. The book contains a number of chapters on organizational and managerial issues followed by methodologies and processes, technical issues, and industry experiences and case studies.

A classic from The Last Word section of the Better Software magazine vault, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. In this issue, Gregory Pope offers alternatives to the dreaded "T" word.

You won't always get along with every coworker in your office, so what should you do to ease office tension when conflict arises? This article offers advice on how to manage conflict in a respectful and productive way.

We can measure, study, and understand the interactions between software and individual users, but what tools exist to understand the interaction among software creators, the software itself, and millions of users? Chris McMahon says we can't look to computer science, engineering, or manufacturing for tools to understand the experience of a large audience. Instead we should look to the performing arts for help understanding the audience experience.

This article discusses the differences between the internationalization and localization of software products for the global market. It provides an overview of the three areas of localization testing including localization UI testing, localization functional testing, and translation testing. Understanding the different processes is useful for any company and tester involved in the globalization of software products.

The author dives into a role that is often misunderstood and not well-defined on many teams, that is, the role of the product owner. Coming from a quality assurance background, the product owner role I’ve seen has taken on new meanings for just about each project on which I’ve worked. I was eager to learn more about what is the product owner’s primary role and how that role can be leveraged in the most valuable way possible.

Many loved Steve Krug’s earlier book “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” The book became a classic for some as it had tremendous impact on the awareness of software usability. Although to some reading this review, perhaps it was not such a novelty. Still, it was an eye-opening experience for users and bosses, too. It’s hard to believe ten years has passed since that book came out, and it has taken Steve Krug that long to write and publish his next classic.