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The Most Common Reasons Why Software Projects Fail

Knowing the basics of software development can greatly improve the project outcome; however, that alone is not enough to prevent project failures. Projects can be categorized as failures because of cost overruns, late deliveries or poor quality, but the right estimation processes can increase the likelihood of project success.

Doug Putnam Taylor Putnam-Majarian
on Jul 13, 2015
Q&A on Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests

An interview with Gojko Adzic, David Evans and Tom Roden on why they wrote this book, how quantifying quality can support testing, balancing trust levels when testing large and complex systems, why automating manual tests is almost always a bad idea, on using production metrics in testing, how to reduce or prevent duplication in test code, and on upcoming books in the fifty quick ideas series.

Ben Linders
on Jun 23, 2015
Q&A on Test Driven Development and Code Smells with James Grenning

InfoQ interviewed James Grenning about why people are not doing technical practices sufficiently or well enough, why he thinks that TDD can be fun, the importance of unit tests, why programmers need to have a good nose for code smells and how they can become better in discovering "bad code”.

Ben Linders
on Jun 19, 2015
Coding Culture: How To Build Better Products by Building Stronger Teams

Software developers spend a tremendous amount of time and energy focused on how to build the best possible products. We obsess over what web framework to use or whether to go with a NoSQL or SQL database. While these questions are important, they often neglect to address an equally important aspect of software development: culture.

Sven Peters
on Apr 14, 2015
Refactoring Coderetreats: In Search of Simple Design

In cities all over the world, groups of software developers have been getting together at weekends repeatedly trying to write code for a given problem, but never completing a solution. At coderetreats, developers learn from each other and refine their software design skills. In this article David examines how they work? What do people say about them? How to make them even better?

David Parsons
on Mar 20, 2015
Evo: The Agile Value Delivery Process, Where ‘Done’ Means Real Value Delivered; Not Code

Current agile practices are far too narrowly focused on delivering code to users and customers. There is no systems-wide view of other stakeholders, of databases, and anything else except the code. This article describes what ‘Evo’ is at core, and how it is different from other Agile practices, and why ‘done’ should mean ‘value delivered to stakeholders’.

Tom Gilb Kai Gilb
on Jan 26, 2015
Creating a Culture of Quality

Every company wants to delight customers with a high-quality product, and many organizations naturally focus on process improvements to reach quality goals. But organizational culture eats process for breakfast. So how do you create a culture of quality? New research on 850 employees who impact quality from 80 companies presents new strategies for shifting values, norms, beliefs, and habits.

Jonathan Levene
on Sep 18, 2014
Improving Data Management with the DMM

The CMMI Institute has launched the Data Management Maturity (DMM)SM model. It can be used to improve data management, helping organizations to bridge the gap between business and IT. Using the DMM, organizations can evaluate and improve their data management practices. The model leverages the principles, structure, and proven approach of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI).

Ben Linders
on Sep 15, 2014
Seven Changes to Remove Waste From Your Software Development Process

This is a story about implementing Lean Software Development in a software vendor house for about 2 years, during which seven major changes have gradually been implemented that have helped the R&D department to remove waste from their software development process with encouraging results.

Cecil Dijoux
on Jul 21, 2014
Building Better Search Engines by Measuring Search Quality

Search engines are developed using standard sets of realistic test cases that let developers measure the relative effectiveness of alternative approaches. This article talks about NIST's Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) project used to create the infrastructure to measure the quality of search results.

Ian Soboroff Paul Over Ellen M. Voorhees
on Jul 06, 2014
Quantifying the Impact of Agile Software Development Practices

Rally Software and Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) are researching the impact of agile software development practices using data from Rally’s Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. InfoQ interviewed Larry Maccherone and Jim McCurley about their collaboration, measurements from the study, conclusions from the analysis and plans for further research.

Ben Linders
on Jul 03, 2014
Bug Fixing Vs. Problem Solving - From Agile to Lean

Lean has proved to be instrumental in moving beyond Agile to set up a practice of continuous improvement with direct effects on team performance and engagement. Making a clear distinction between bugs and problems has proved to be instrumental in this improvement.

Cecil Dijoux
on Apr 07, 2014