No bug left behind

The Software Quality Digest with the latest articles, blog postings and discussions about software quality, testing, usability, accessibility, scalability and related topics of the past week. If you have a relevant link for the Software Quality Digest, please let us know and we would be happy to include it in the next digest.

Software Quality and Testing

• What Are The “Never Events” for Software Quality? – “These are not events that never occur, but events that should never occur.”
• Craftsmanship, Quality, Dogma, and Pragmatism – “A software craftsman takes pride in his work, but more than that they should take pride in delivering value to the customer.” and a reply by Corey Haines
• As for Peer Review, Code Review? – Ted Neward compares peer reviews for scientific papers to software code reviews
• I Love Pair-Programming – “I see pairing work so well every day that I consider my career prior to my current job to have consisted mostly of wasting time.”

Performance and Scalability

• Numbers Everyone Should Know – High Scalability on the costs of reads and writes, broken down to cache, memory, files and network

Usability and Accessibility

• 9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design – “Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.”
• The Future of Touch – “Yet there still is a question as to whether the iPhone-like multi-touch capabilities of a touchscreen OS will become as big of a hit in traditional computing as they were on the smartphone.”

Security

• Balancing Security and Usability in Authentication – Schneier on the difficulties designing a secure system while keeping it usable at the same time
• Rate Limiting and Velocity Checking – “Take a long, hard look your own website — how would it deal with a roving band of bored, morally ambiguous schoolkids?”
• Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques of 2008 (Official) – “The opportunity provides a chance to get a closer look at the new attacks that could be used against us in the future — some of which already have.”

Process and Methodology

• The Bad Apple: Group Poison – Jeff Atwood on team work and group dynamics when dealing with unmotivated or incompetent team members
• 20 Steps to Better Wireframing – ThinkVitamin with a good article on wireframing and prototyping user interfaces and web applications
• Work in small batches – Eric Ries from Lessons Learned: “Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches.”
• How Scrum is Like Marijuana – “Scrum is relatively inexpensive to try and what’s the worst that could happen? You can always choose not to use it again. It isn’t like it’s going to kill you.”
• The Rush to Lean Makes Me Nervous – “As Steve Freeman points out, by a strict Lean interpretation of the manufacturing school product development looks wasteful. And it is. And that’s OK because it isn’t manufacturing.”
• Top 10 Activities of the Product Owner – “The responsibilities of the Product Owner are onerous and there is no one else on the team to cover for him/her or pick up the slack.”

Announcements and Books

• Reboot The Book – A new online book by David Longstreet about the software industry, measuring software development and about project failures

Misc

• Programmer Competency Matrix – Nice matrix to assess the competency and experience of a software developer (this is especially useful for interviews)
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist – As the name implies, a checklist to make sure a website or web application meets all critical quality criteria
• The Case For Replacing Java With Python In Education – “Overall, there is no big loss in Computer Science concepts when moving from Java to Python like there was when we moved away from C++.”
• IE6 Warning – Stop Living In The Past – Get off of IE6 – An effort to get users to upgrade to modern browsers by showing warning messages to IE6 users

Related posts:

1. Software Quality Digest – 2009-03-13
2. Software Quality Digest – 2009-07-27
3. Software Quality Digest – 2009-04-06

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