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Showing posts from August, 2012

Seven Pragmatic Practices to Improve Software Quality - A Forrester research report

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A new Forrester Research report, Seven Pragmatic Practices to Improve Software Quality , by analysts Margo Visitacion and Mike Gualtieri. Seven steps taken directly from the Forrester report: Pragmatic Practice 1 Define Quality to Match Your Needs Impact on Quality: Meet business requirements; achieve a satisfying user experience. Benefit: Your ability to achieve quality is improved because the application development team is not charged with unrealistically perfect expectations. Rather, it is chartered with a definition of quality that fits the given time, resource, and budget constraints. Relevant Roles: Business stakeholders; entire application development team. Pragmatic Practice 2 Broadcast Simple Quality Metrics Impact on Quality: Reduce defects. Benefit: Highly visible metrics keep quality top of mind for the entire team and expose when efforts fall short. Relevant Roles: Entire application development team. Pragmatic Practice 3 Fine-Tune Team/Individual

Another reason why testing is so important!

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Bad Algorithm Burns $440 Million -  Worst Software Testing Day EVER Knight Capital, a firm that specializes in executing trades for retail brokers, took $440 million in cash losses Wednesday due to a faulty test of new trading software. In headlines it’s being called a trading “glitch,” which isn’t nearly as accurate as the term I’d use: “f**king disaster.” The broad outline of the story is here and more colorful, bloody details are here. Briefly, here’s what happened: Knight Capital’s worst day in IT started Wednesday morning with a test run of their new trading software. An old pal of mine who’s following the story closely (and is also deep in both IT and trading) told me that the company set up the software to work with only a few stocks. They also set the buy/sell points well outside where the markets were currently trading to ensure that nothing would actually execute. But somehow – and this will probably the be the subject of several lawsuits, books, and maybe ev