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Category Archives: Quality

Why “gold plating” is a lousy name

Saturday, June 9, 2007

A few days ago I posted an answer to a question about gold plating and scope creep to the Head First PMP forum. I’m not surprised the question came up — people really seem to have trouble with the concept of gold plating. And I don’t think it’s because it’s a tough concept to get. [...]

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Quality Really IS Free

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Scott Berkun recently brought up Philip Crosby’s classic Quality is Free on his PMClinic mailing list, in a discussion about how to “successfully argue for time for higher quality”. If argued on its merits, that should be an easy one: it really is cheaper to introduce activities that raise the quality of the software than [...]

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Iterative Development and the Efficiency Gap

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Jenny and I were talking yesterday about short, time-boxed releases. Breaking a project into short, frequently delivered releases is a technique which has been gaining in popularity lately. Agile methodologies like SCRUM and XP rely on them, but they can be found as phased releases in traditional development shops as well. It’s clear why they’re [...]

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Focus Testing on Conformance To Requirements

Sunday, February 5, 2006

Many projects I have worked on in my career have suffered from misunderstandings about quality from the very beginning.  Software testers were told to “bang on” the software and do some “try to break it” tests (usually for some prescribed amount of time) and report back on what they found.  Sometimes,  work like that will [...]

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Getting started with use cases

Monday, January 30, 2006

A friend of mine is introducing use cases to his company, and asked for some advice. It sounds like an interesting project — they’ll be using it for both a hardware and software component. Here’s what I told him: Spend a lot of time talking about what’s actually going to be covered in the use [...]

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