The Mindset

Here’s the deal. You find yourself in a city you do not know. How did you get there? You don’t know. It is just as if you were dropped in the middle of this foreign city by aliens. No one around seems to speak your language. Everywhere you look you see roads, buildings, cars – […]

Software Quality Assurance people love measuring things. Test coverage, schedule slip, hours slip, velocity, number of reviews, the existence of reviews, number of defects, the average time it took to resolve a defect, function points, cyclomatic complexity, and of course the famous KLOC. If you got all excited reading these last couple of lines, you must […]

After publishing the post Visualize Your Data, I received a mail from Tom Harris wondering why I hadn’t mentioned the book on data visualization: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. I’d had a good reason for not mentioning it. I’d never read this book until that moment.
So, I followed my own advice and […]

In a recent article Eric Sink claims to have found the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of our industry: why do we all sell products with bugs? And the answer is: The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.
OK then. We can now go on with our lives knowing we […]

Data visualization is not a new concept. Anyone who ever prepared a business presentation knows that a colorful diagram expressing the data visually has a much greater impact on the audience.
But data visualization is more than merely a presentation technique. With data visualization you can easily gain new insights, which enable you to take action. Coming up with the same […]

Mouse gestures are the latest word in user interface usability.
After years of research, numerous focus groups, and endless discussions with world famous ergonomics specialists, the Software Usability Consortium (SUC) has decided that the one feature that will make software more usable and natural to users is the ability to represent common commands as an intuitive […]

In Organizational Under Currents and More On Underwater Currents I wrote about how the people who are actually doing most of the work express the real organizational culture – the subtext of organizational culture. The written procedures, the metrics, and the things which are being said publicly are only the tip of the iceberg. In many, […]

J. Timothy King has done it again! He took the words out of my mouth (well… keyboard).
I meant to tell you about some personal experience I had this week, but J. Timothy King has done a much better job in capturing the essence of a similar one. And he doesn’t even know me! ;)
So, without further […]

I’ve just finished refining the QualityAspect.com and Lucid Quality web site design. The primary change was the design of the banner at the top of the page.
As I always do, I’ve asked some of my friends for feedback on the new design. I almost never receive a simple one word feedback. the comments are […]

There are many tools out there for checking your test coverage (in terms of tested code). Unit tests coverage is becoming as popular as unit tests themselves. And that is of course a step in the right direction.
Test coverage data helps developers identify missing test cases. It also helps development managers to get a […]