process improvement

Stop Being Difficult! How to Deal with Passive Aggressive Stakeholders

Project teams have to learn to manage the difficult personalities they encounter on a project. The key is to identify which type of personality you are dealing with, then quickly apply approaches to smooth over the situation. Here are some tips for handling passive aggressive stakeholders' concerns.

Joy Beatty's picture
Joy Beatty
Creating Testable Requirements and Acceptance Criteria

Testable requirements, or acceptance criteria, are the communication of an expectation between its originator and potential stakeholders. Many testers struggle with this starting point. But once you succeed, you know the processes that can build and test a system implementing “good” requirements.

Claire Lohr's picture
Claire Lohr
Tapping into the Power of Introverts in IT

Introverts—those who rarely talk to others, seldom engage socially, and answer questions only when asked—can be the strongest contributors on a team, but only if they’re engaged effectively. Here are some tactics that can help leverage the enormous strengths of the quiet ones on your team.

Deepika Mamnani's picture
Deepika Mamnani
The Communication Trap Posed by Certainty

Certainty is a potentially dangerous mental flaw when we assume we know what others are thinking. It’s in situations of absolute certainty that we’re most likely to be wrong. When you're facing a problem, ask yourself if you’re sure you understand what the problem is—and ask for clarification.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Estimate Effort Based on Past Performance

How often have you estimated how long it would take to complete a task, only to be off by a whole week? That's because we assume we will begin the task immediately and have a forty-hour week to work on it. There's a better way: prediction based on performance. Just find a batch size for your work.

Matthew Heusser's picture
Matthew Heusser
The Mismeasurement of Software

Having participated in a number of unsuccessful metrics programs throughout his career, Lee Copeland has identified and distilled four key principles that help prevent the mismeasurement of software. Evaluate how your metrics work against these four principles. Do you need to make any changes?

Lee Copeland's picture
Lee Copeland
Mobile Testing: The First Step—or Two

On many mobile projects, testing is not practiced well—or sometimes not done at all. Many testers from the desktop world are moving into mobile, and there is much they can take from traditional testing into the mobile space. Here are some ideas to get you thinking about testing mobile devices.

Jon Hagar's picture
Jon Hagar
Are Your Metrics Causing Unintended Consequences?

When you collect metrics that involve people, it will change the way they behave—but not always for the better. Attaching numbers to how people work often makes them perform their work differently. Every time you gather metrics, you should try to analyze what the unintended consequences could be.

Rick Craig's picture
Rick Craig