You are doing it wrong if you are not using test first

Many teams are struggling with delivering modern software because they are not building with Test First principals. Test First gives us the assurance that we have built the correct thing, that what we built is what the customer asked for and that when we change things we don’t break anything inadvertently.

Quality enablement with Visual Studio 2012

In the modern application lifecycle one of the key messages is one of quality enablement. Quality will be the key differentiator between you and your competitors over the next few years and the old excuses are just that… old.

Release Management with Team Foundation Server 2012

Northwest Cadence has been working hard with customers to improve their release management in Team Foundation Server 2012. While on the surface it looks like TFS 2012 has little in the way of support for release management, you would be wrong. There are many features in Team Foundation Server, many of them added in TFS 2010 that can aid you in creating a release management strategy.

The Insufficiency of Scrum is a fallacy

The insufficiency of Scrum is a fallacy perpetrated by teams that don’t step up their practices in concert with their planning and don’t really want to make it work anyway. You can fail doing Kanban, XP or Merese and SSADM just as easily. The goal of Agile is to have you fail sooner and for it to cost less.

Standard Environments for Automated Deployment and Testing

Standard Environments in Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server make it possible to have an automated deployment of your software to a development or QA environment. You can then have a bunch of automated tests run in those environments, collecting data all the while.

Automated Testing in a modern application lifecycle

If we are building software in a modern application lifecycle there is no way that we would be able to deliver modern applications without some form of automated testing. Automated testing is the one thing that makes sure that we are able to deliver working software that meets the quality bar while still keeping the […]