The Seapine View

If you haven’t been intimately involved in an application development project, this question probably evokes some puzzlement. You ship your software when it’s done, right? Well, maybe. There are a number of considerations that you take into account when deciding when to ship an application—is the coding complete, is the quality there, and is the business ready?

The developers are responsible for determining when coding is complete, while the business owners have to determine if the application is ready to increase revenue or reduce costs.

I’m interested in focusing on the second aspect—the assessment of application quality. We can point to things like defect rate or requirements met as shipping criteria, but those are still ambiguous terms. Any application is going to have defects, and some requirements will be met better than others.

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Thanks to everyone who joined us for the A Software Manager’s Guide to Defining Testing in an Agile Age webinar. The recording is now available if you missed the training session or want to watch it again. Q&A from the session follows.

Download video in mp4 format

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It used to be that users, or product management, submitted a set of features and requirements to the development team and waited patiently while development constructed exactly what they asked for. Six months later, when users saw this new application for the first time, they realized that what they asked for wasn’t really what they needed. Something had been lost in the translation from what they needed to what they told development to create, to what development ultimately created. “No problem,” development would say when told the existing software didn’t meet a specific need, “we can change that in the next release.” And six months later, it would indeed be changed!

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There were many updates to the blog in January. Here is our monthly recap:

Burn Down Chart

Creating a Burn Down Chart in TestTrack - Describes burn down charts, how to create them, and the numerous features TestTrack provides.

Links versus Relationships – Explains how links and relationships connect artifacts in TestTrack, and the differences between the two.

Kanban by Example – Describes Kanban, an Agile delivery method that does not use fixed length sprints or iterations.  More information can be found in the Mixing Methodologies Agile Expedition eBook.

What Software Managers Should Know About Testing in Agile Projects (Part 1) – Explains how Agile methodologies have evolved to address IT project failure.

How To: QA Wizard Pro Unattended Testing - Includes a PDF download about how to shorten your testing cycle by combining scripts into a batch file that runs unattended.

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TestTrack filters can solve a number of requests from finding to sorting data, filters also play a big role in automation rules. Filters can be published as RSS feeds, can be interactive and dynamic, and can also be used in most list views, reports and folders.

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Prospective customers often ask me if there is a way to approve all the requirements in a requirement document at once.

I usually ask a few questions before responding:

• Are there multiple document approvers?
• Does each document approver have an area of expertise?
• Does the approver verify the content of each and every requirement in the document?
• Is there a need to have accountability in specific areas of the requirements process, such as design, technical, or software?

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