by Johanna Rothman. This article was originally published in Software Development Magazine, June 1998. Large, permanent engineering cultural change–or process improvement–generally takes a long time to implement. However, key repeatable processes can free up time in an organization and let people spend more time on the creative work of software development. I recently worked with a […]
© 1998 Johanna Rothman Test managers really serve two very different customers, their testers and corporate management. For the testers, the test manager helps develop product test strategies, and provides test expertise to the testing group. For management, the test manager gathers product information so that corporate management can decide when the product is ready
© 1998 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Organizations struggle [1] with their process improvement efforts for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most common struggle pattern is to take a long time developing a general understanding of their processes and then trying to define all possible alternatives in the product development process. This pattern leads to large,
by Johanna Rothman. © 1998 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the
© 1998 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Organizations produce and buy packaged software to save time and money. Often, the producers feel that savings will result from diminished product testing, but that wish may simply mean the software test professionals (STPs) won’t be given enough time to test and assess a software product as thoroughly as they
© 1998 Johanna Rothman. Most project managers want to reduce risk during a project. One way to reduce overall risk is to define and focus the project goals up front, and continually verify those goals and progress toward those goals during the project. Bob Grady [1], claims there are three common goals for software product
Copyright © 1998 Cem Kaner (kaner.com) and Johanna Rothman Many project managers don’t know what to expect from a testing organization. They don’t know what the group does, how the product is going to be tested, when things will be done, what deliverables to expect, or how to find this information out. Complicating matters, some
Project management can be described as the activity of bringing all participants from within a department to successfully complete a product deliverable. Iterative planning and tracking are techniques used by some project managers to avoid having to choose between reducing the number of features or extending the schedule. Abstract Project management can be described as
© 1997 Johanna Rothman. Introduction Resistance, especially to process improvement, can take many forms and levels of intensity. Process improvement, the activities of changing how people work, can appear (and can be) very threatening to people. For some of us, it is difficult to see the resistance at first. We may think that people misunderstood
© 1997 Johanna Rothman. Abstract Recent writing in the software process improvement literature [1,2] discuss those organizations who start off at an ad hoc level (CMM level 1) and proceed to a repeatable level (CMM level 2) and higher. However, there are many organizations who cannot make progress towards level 2 until they have a