process improvement
 |
Look to Corporate Standards to Guide Your Organization In large organizations with distributed teams, departments can have their own procedures, acting as if they are in completely isolated silos. One approach to solving this issue is establishing corporate standards. Tap the models of widely used standards to create practical guidance for your own organization. |
|
 |
Use Process Improvement Methods to Elevate Your Test/QA Workflow Quality assurance testers may feel overwhelmed by all they have to do and the short time they have to do it. Implementing proven process improvement techniques can help streamline or replace existing models, making testers’ workloads manageable and letting them accomplish more—without sacrificing quality. |
|
 |
Who’s Responsible for What? Use a RACI Matrix to Keep It Straight As projects get larger and more complex, roles and responsibilities can become confusing. To clarify, teams can create a RACI matrix: a chart that shows who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for any work product. Each role has a different level of authority, so everyone knows their duty. |
|
 |
Accelerating Your DevOps Processes with Agile Everyone wants to accelerate the application development process. Agile has done a lot to help, but going faster without understanding whether we are going in the right direction has a significant risk of us getting lost. To really achieve development velocity, you need to understand agile in a pragmatic way. |
|
 |
Automate for Efficiency: How Test Automation Does More than Spot Bugs Some form of automation should be used to streamline testing, but leveraging automation as a crutch won’t help you or your team spot every bug and produce high-quality software. In automation, the tools don’t do all the testing—they simply do what they are told to do by the actual tester. |
|
 |
The Risk of Negative Customer Experiences If people have a positive customer experience, they tell a few friends, but if they have a negative one, they tell everyone—and now that social media have made sharing so easy, no flaw, delay, or mistake seems too small to complain about. More than ever, it's important to create positive customer experiences. |
|
 |
The Consequences of Project Delay An often overlooked and underappreciated aspect of project schedules is the consequences of delay on others. Due dates and commitments sometimes matter more than they appear. Knowing the larger context of your project can help you prioritize how you undertake it, consider options, and improve problem-solving. |
|
 |
Start the New Year with a Retrospective This new year, instead of a resolution, consider a retrospective. Rather than just setting one large goal for yourself, you review what you've been doing, what's been working and what hasn't, what you want to accomplish, and what small steps you can take every day to reach your objective. |
