Everything I Know About Project Management, I Learned from
Game of Thrones

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In George R.R. Martin’s masterful series, A Song of Ice and Fire (currently an HBO television show, Game of Thrones), many characters in the fantasy world of Westeros create goals, make plans, maneuver people and events toward the goal they want, and eventually realize their goal. It’s kind … [Read more...]

Using Peer Code Reviews as a Professional Development Tool

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Over the years, I have had the privilege of working with hundreds of developers.  Overall, I have found them to be intelligent, witty, focused, incredibly funny… and also pretty isolated. Developers are most effective when they have long un-interrupted periods of time to concentrate on … [Read more...]

Testers and Developers, Can We Please Get Along?

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A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend the StarEAST conference in Orlando. As in past years, it was inspiring to see so many qualified testers and QA managers all under the same roof. Speaker sessions were relevant, humorous and interesting, and from the list of topics, it's evident … [Read more...]

How Collaborator’s Eclipse Plug-In Makes Your Life Easier

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Ask any Eclipse developer and they will tell you that they prefer to do all of their work in Eclipse, rather than toggling between multiple systems. This is especially true for code reviews. So it makes perfect sense that we created an Eclipse plug-in for Collaborator, which gives you the … [Read more...]

From Aristotle to Descartes – A Brief History of Quality

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In the famous book Peopleware, Tom de Marco and Timothy Lister name “Cult of quality” as the top item in their list of the six things needed to build effective software development teams. Cult of quality seems to strike a deep chord in us as human beings. Again and again I have experienced … [Read more...]

When Buzzwords and Jargon Backfire

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An interesting thing happened to me the other day. I was getting a pitch about a new product from a pretty well-known enterprise and the marketing person said: "We are members of the 2012 API Billionaire’s Club." Wait... what? I'd like to note that the product had nothing to do with APIs and … [Read more...]

How Quality Impacts Your Bottom Line

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In this guest post, Jamie Turner, CEO of 60SecondMarketer.com, talks about a number of businesses that have focused their attention on quality and provides metrics to show how beneficial this decision was for each company. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re … [Read more...]

Quality is as Important in Marketing as it is in Software Development

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In this guest post, Jamie Turner, CEO of 60SecondMarketer.com, explains why quality, strategy and execution are all just as important in the marketing world as they are in software development. If you’ve been hanging around SmartBear long enough, you know we’re very focused on the … [Read more...]

Your Code May Work, But It Still Might Suck

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Why one of Steve Jobs's guiding principles should also be yours. And also: What you can learn about code quality from Doom’s source code. In his revealing biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Issacson told of Jobs's fastidiousness when it came to product details, even the stuff people would not … [Read more...]

Should Programming Classes be Covering Software Testing, Too?

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You might have noticed the recent publicity blitz on behalf of code.org. Or, you might be living under a rock. Code.org was formed earlier this year with the goal of providing young people with mentorship and education in the computer science industry. There are a number of organizations … [Read more...]