Linda G. Hayes

Just when you think you have a handle on your development and testing processes, you realize you really don’t. Now, you find out you need a robust means of managing the issues that arise from building and supporting your own software. Sometimes these issues are outright bugs, sometimes design flaws, and sometimes enhancement requests. But […]

Like any QA bigot, I can be critical of developers who seem to favor speed over quality when it comes to tracking bugs and testing during development. But, as in most cases, there are two sides to this story, and once you understand each perspective it makes the coder’s conundrum clear. In a nutshell, programmers […]

Planning for full software test coverage usually sounds like preparing only one strategy for a championship chess match. The assumption that you will have the opportunity to completely cover all of the features and functions–both new and old–of the next software release sounds like planning to win a game without considering your opponents moves. It’s […]

Linda G. Hayes Do you remember learning about irrational numbers? I always pictured them as being somehow unreasonable, numbers you had to coax or cajole into behaving rationally. Actually, they are numbers that never end–no matter how far you carry them out–like pi. In that sense, the term is particularly apropos for describing the proper […]

To paraphrase a recent conference speech by Tom DeMarco, the insightful author of books and essays on software development, most projects are like Greek tragedies: During the first half, it appears that man is in control of events; the climax reveals that events are in fact in control of man. So it is with software […]