Posts by Chris Sterling

An Exercise to Identify and Prioritize Software Debt

I am passionate about managing software debt. You may have noticed from the articles and blog entries I have written and presentation slides on the subject. Over the past couple years teams that I work with use an exercise to identify software debt in their software. Here are the basic steps:

Draw a model of your [...]

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Official Launch of AgileEVM at Agile 2010

It has been a while since we have posted to this blog but please stay tuned for more frequent updates. The reason for the blog interruption was that we were finishing off a book, “Managing Software Debt”, and releasing a product, AgileEVM. We thought our first blog entry to start our emergence back out of [...]

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Focus on Team Communication

In the agile community there are some common practices that are either seen as valuable or to be avoided. Two of those practices are estimation using Planning Poker and Sprint Planning task breakdown. The focus for many teams in these practices is on the estimates themselves and how “accurate” they are. It has been my [...]

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Extreme Feedback from My Tools – Part 1: Maven 2 Configuration

For many years now, it has been a goal of mine to get feedback as early as possible when developing software. Past blog entries here and here have discussed how we can approach increased feedback. A tweet from Jason Gorman mentioned his list of tools that provide continuous feedback on his code and design: “Emma, [...]

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HOWTO: Maven + StoryTestIQ + Selenium RC

StoryTestIQ is an automated acceptance testing tool, which was originally a mashup of 2 existing open source projects, Selenium and FitNesse. StoryTestIQ is many times shortened to STIQ (pronounced “stick”) so it rolls off the tongue more easily. STIQ takes the idea of testing inside the browser a la Selenium and enables editing, tagging, and [...]

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Slides from Managing Software Debt Talk at PNSQC 2009

Tomorrow at 1:30pm I will be discussing my paper published by the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2009 in Portland, OR on “Managing Software Debt: Continued Delivery of High Value as Systems Age”. I have uploaded the slides for this presentation and I hope that some of the new content will help those looking for [...]

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Brent Barton and Chris Sterling – Partner to Bring New Product to Market

Brent Barton and I have decided to start a new company called Sterling Barton that will focus on delivering products to market. We have just started this venture and in our spare time have begun development for our first product. The following letter explains our move to separate from SolutionsIQ so that we can concentrate [...]

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Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) Coming Up

It has been a while since I have blogged. I apologize and have plenty of good excuses (if there are such things) about why (book, traveling, family time, etc…). I am now back and will be blogging on a more frequent basis in the next few months.
My first blog entry back is about the upcoming [...]

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Executable Specifications – Presentation from AgilePalooza

Earlier this year I did a presentation on Executable Specficiations for AgilePalooza conference. There is information about working with legacy code, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems, and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) using automated acceptance testing tools. Also, the presentation lists types of automated acceptance testing tools out there along with actual names of tools and what [...]

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The Forgotten Scrum Elements

I have worked with many individuals, teams, and organizations in the use of Scrum. During that time, I have found that 2 parts of Scrum continually overlooked in implementation. Since Scrum is already a minimal framework, just enough to keep a team out of chaos, when a piece of Scrum is left out problems are [...]

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