Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Browse by Tags

All Tags » Software Process   (RSS)
Wednesday, January 02, 2008 4:49 AM

Two Software Development Worlds

I was recently listening to an interview with Joel Spolsky . The main subject is interviewing and hiring, but in the course of the interview Joel touches on an interesting point. He says that there are two major types of software: Shrinkwrap and Custom
Posted by SteveRowe | 2 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, November 12, 2007 6:17 AM

Always Question the Process

Let me recount a story from the television show Babylon 5 . In one episode there is the description of guard posted in the middle of an empty courtyard. There is nothing there to protect. When one of the characters, Londo, questions why, he finds that
Posted by SteveRowe | 4 Comments
Filed under:
Friday, November 09, 2007 9:17 AM

Keep Process Simple

Year ago one of our Software Test Engineers was tasked with documenting our smoke* process. It should have been something simple like: Developer packages binaries for testing Developer places smoke request on web page Tester signs up for smoke on web
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 08, 2007 7:17 AM

The Need for a Real Build Process

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has a good post about how " F5 is not a build process ." In it, he explains how you need a real centralized build process. F5 (the "build and debug" shortcut key in Visual Studio) on a developer's machine is not a built process.
Posted by SteveRowe | 0 Comments
Monday, October 22, 2007 8:15 AM

Helping Groups Succeed

or What to do when you aren't in control but neither is the leader. A while back I wrote about providing clarity as a leader. As part of that essay I mentioned some techniques for keeping groups on track. Those are well and good if you are the leader,
Posted by SteveRowe | 2 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, August 20, 2007 6:37 AM

Tacit Approval Often Isn’t

Most of us have found ourselves in situations where we need someone’s approval to get something done, but we can’t seem to get them to respond. It would be okay if they said no. It would be better if they said yes. We just need an answer yet we can’t
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
Filed under:
Monday, August 13, 2007 9:15 AM

Scrum Meetings for Test

A year and a half ago I talked about how I was running scrum meetings with my team. Since then, we've refined the process but have consistently held scrums on a regular basis. Note that I'm not running a full Scrum system with sprints and product backlogs
Posted by SteveRowe | 3 Comments
Thursday, July 19, 2007 8:00 AM

Hofstadter's Law

Good advice for all project managers. Hofstadter's Law : It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Posted by SteveRowe | 0 Comments
Wednesday, July 04, 2007 2:11 PM

The Three Stonecutters

Lots of interesting quotes in Dreaming in Code. This one is the story of three stonecutters. Each is asked what he is doing. The first answers that he is, "making a living wage." The second says, "I am doing the best job of cutting stones in the entire
Posted by SteveRowe | 4 Comments
Sunday, July 01, 2007 8:49 AM

Avoid 3-Card Combinations

I used to play collectible card games. I attended Whitman College during Richard Garfield 's tenure there as a math professor so I got into Magic: The Gathering near its inception. For those of you who don't play these, the basic system goes something
Posted by SteveRowe | 2 Comments
Thursday, June 28, 2007 1:34 AM

Trade Accuracy for Understanding

I found myself giving this advice to two people today. It came in the context off preparing a presentation for upper management. The desire was to communicate an understanding of what (and why) we are creating a piece of technology. The difficulty was
Posted by SteveRowe | 4 Comments
Filed under:
Sunday, January 14, 2007 1:51 AM

Duplication of Effort Is Good?

I was in a meeting the other day deciding what to do next in our testing efforts. Several times during the meeting someone made a suggestion which was countered by a statement something like this: "Shouldn't we let the centralized team handle this?" or
Posted by SteveRowe | 0 Comments
Friday, November 10, 2006 12:02 PM

Bug Taxonomy

When you get toward the end of a product, you have to make the tough calls about what gets fixed and what doesn't. Most bugs fall into one of two obvious buckets: Must Fix - Something is really bad here. We cannot ship the product without fixing it. Won't
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
Thursday, June 15, 2006 10:25 AM

Prescriptive Advice For Successful Unit Testing

At the beginning of the Vista (then Longhorn) project our team decided that we would implement unit tests. This was the first attempt in our locale to try to use them. We had some successes and some failures. Out of that I have learned several things.
Posted by SteveRowe | 5 Comments
Tuesday, February 07, 2006 4:30 PM

Friendly Reminder: Utilize Source Control

I just finished talking to someone who lost 1 1/2 weeks of work due to an inadvertent key stroke. It's not only hard drive failure that may get you. With hardware stability quite high these days, we sometimes feel invincible. It is easy to get complacent
Posted by SteveRowe | 1 Comments
More Posts Next page »
 
Page view tracker