risk management

Sign: Apocalypse Ahead Manage Project Problems without Getting Trapped by Catastrophic Thinking

It would be short-sighted for any project manager not to consider the potential risks in the project and not to evaluate and continue re-evaluating what can go wrong. But there's a difference between planning for risk and falling victim to catastrophic thinking—focusing on unlikely or irrational worst-case scenarios.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Better Software magazine cover What’s in the Spring 2017 Issue of Better Software Magazine

This is the second issue of Better Software magazine for 2017, and it has the largest page count of the last few years. With close to one hundred thousand subscribers worldwide, Better Software is fulfilling a real need in the software development community. As always, this issue has some thought-provoking articles.

Ken Whitaker's picture
Ken Whitaker
Mobile app security testing 3 Essential Components to Building a Security Testing Practice

Most mobile app development teams lack a security testing practice, or if they do have one, it lacks the maturity to be effective. But the great security practices are not necessarily those that spend the most money or have the most engineers. It’s the ones that have adopted these three fundamental concepts.

Alan Crouch's picture
Alan Crouch
Contemplating What Constitutes an Organizational Crisis

It can be hard to envision what would constitute a crisis for your organization until you’re facing one. But defining what events could be disastrous for your company is the first step toward planning for them—and having an emergency plan could be the difference that helps you respond in time.

Naomi Karten's picture
Naomi Karten
Software Project Management: The Responsibility of Communicating Quality Trade-Offs

Some requirements are negotiable, even if it sounds like they aren’t. But expectations have to be managed carefully to avoid problems. Payson Hall explains that when executives agree to sacrifice quality in order to hit a deadline, it's up to the team to ensure they understand the tradeoff and possible risks.

Payson Hall's picture
Payson Hall
Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing

For software development, risk-based testing is becoming a major necessity to guarantee that users are getting the best experience possible without encountering too many issues. Quality assurance teams need to effectively gauge products based on the potential risk they bring.

Sanjay Zalavadia's picture
Sanjay Zalavadia
The Ethical Responsibility of Defect Severity Classification

When dealing with defect classification, it's important to not blindly adhere to the criteria without consideration for real business or human implications. If your software does safety-critical work, do the defect levels reflect that? Or could something go live with potentially disastrous consequences?

Payson Hall's picture
Payson Hall
Calculating the Cost of Failure

What is the cost to your business of an outage due to a major bug? Usually it's calculated as mean time between failures multiplied by mean time to recovery. But what if you could deploy to a limited number of users and monitor effects? Then the equation includes a third variable: number of users impacted.

Matt Heusser's picture
Matt Heusser