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Aging Gracefully in QA Employee churn is inevitable in every industry, and positions are being filled by fresh young faces all the time. Instead of becoming worried or insecure, senior team members should embrace their new status as someone to be looked up to for experience, lessons, and mentoring abilities. Here's how to do that in QA. |
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Absentee Leadership: The Worst Kind of Manager Absentee leaders are managers who are physically present but psychologically absent. They are incompetent and disengaged, to the extent that they don't support their teams adequately. If you have an absentee manager (and don’t have the luxury of seeking another position), here's how you can try to handle the situation. |
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Making (and Keeping) Project Risk Visible Project managers recommend how much should be invested to address various risks based on their understanding of project context, but the final decision about what to do and when those efforts are sufficient belongs to the sponsor. Risk management requires executive input, so sponsors need to see all risk data you have. |
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Good Process, Bad Process “Process” is a word that seems to have a lot of baggage. Depending on whom you ask, process is either essential to delivering value, or something that gets in the way. But this is the wrong way to frame the issue. A process is not inherently good or bad; it's how you use it, and whether it's right for your situation. |
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Scrum Roles, Goals, and You The Scrum Guide specifies that there are three roles: product owner, developer, and ScrumMaster. It’s essential that a Scrum team have each of these roles to help it work well. But depending on how you implement the roles, you may end up hurting rather than helping your Scrum process. Focus on goals, not job titles. |
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Does Agile Have Too Many Meetings? Because agile favors lots of short meetings, it may seem like they take up a lot more time. But when you compare it to time spent meeting in the pre-agile days, it's usually actually less. However, this doesn’t mean all meetings you attend are useful. Here are a few tips for deciding if all your meetings are necessary. |
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Defect Reporting: The Next Steps When a software defect is identified, best practices usually only pertain to the initial writing of the defect, not the tasks required to close it. Many factors can influence the tester's work. The solution is to add a “Next Steps” section that identifies the work remaining and the person responsible for completing it. |
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3 Common Scrum Anti-Patterns and How to Fix Them For a Scrum team to operate successfully, the entire team must honor the Scrum values of commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. But it's easy to fall into practices that can erode trust and collaboration. Here are three common anti-patterns that emerge in Scrum, as well as the solutions to overcome them. |