~ by Randy Wagner Production support, production maintenance, whatever you call it, is usually the least sexy team. It gets squeezed the hardest, is given the highest expectations for turnaround time, and still has to manage work from every functional direction. But despite all the demands, it must deliver quality as economically as possible. So how do we balance budget, timeline, and ...

~ by Randy Wagner We did not arrive at our current processes by chance. Whatever the process—whether it is how we use the agile methodology for our project, defect management, or any of the other major and minor processes we follow on a daily basis—it is a result of best practice, team experience, and management priorities. However, that’s not to say we ...

~ by Randy Wagner Which is More Important—Efficiency or Predictability? It depends. All of us make decisions in our work, regardless of our role in projects or our level in our careers. We endeavor to do the best we can, over-deliver on our promises, and manage our workloads. Some work can be done individually; other work depends on teammates or even other ...

~ by Randy Wagner How to Think about QA to Promote Success Some concepts are perceived in black and white - binary terms. Justice, for example, denotes that a wrong has been righted. What about the quality aspects of justice? Was the punishment severe enough? Was the process fair to both parties along the way? The innocent went free but at what ...

~ by Randy Wagner Why the Ability to Ask Penetrating Questions Matters As we move from newbie to experienced in our careers, we’ve all been in a meeting where we are busy explaining something to management, only to have them ask some incisive question that completely alters the discussion and outcome. While there is obviously a need for knowledge and experience to get ...

~ by Randy Wagner One of the Challenging Aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle is Keeping Everyone on the Same Page BAs write requirements, Developers design and code, QAs write tests, and the Product Owner (PO) gives the final blessing or requests rework, hopefully to complete within the sprint. That’s an agile process but it sounds an awful lot like waterfall methodology. ...