Using Free and Open Source Tools to Manage Software Quality

An agile process implementation

The principles of agile software development place more emphasis on individuals and interactions than on processes and tools. They steer us away from heavy documentation requirements and guide us along a path of reacting efficiently to change rather than sticking rigidly to a pre-defined plan. To support this flexible method of operation, it is important to have suitable applications to manage the team's activities. It is also essential to implement effective frameworks to ensure quality is being built into the product early and at all levels. With these concerns in mind and coming from a budget-conscious perspective, this article will explore the free and open source applications and tools used by one organization in its quest to build process and quality around its projects and products.

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The Perfect Dev/Test Lab: 10 Principles that make it Possible

Hyper-agility in software development requires infrastructure and automation that not only keeps pace with development processes but actually helps accelerate cycles and improve overall quality. It is arguably economically infeasible to build an ideal lab entirely on-premise due to the bursty and transient nature of dev/test workloads, but now with new technologies that normalize the clouds, hyper-agile development and test is increasingly within reach of most enterprises. The 10 ingredients listed below and described in the article at can make for dev/test lab nirvana.

1. Agile dev/test has bursty patterns and requires practically infinite pool of infrastructure resources
2. Developers should have self-service access to infrastructure
3. Ability to test on replicas of production
4. Infrastructure should be automated at the application level
5. Continuous integration – from application to infrastructure
6. Easy collaboration between dev and test teams across locations
7. Ability to reproduce bugs
8. Rapid prototyping
9. Ability to monitor usage of resources
10. Cost efficiency
11. Bonus: Extreme Testing

Voke Research: Market Snapshot Report - Service Virtualization

This report reveals the findings of an in-depth survey of 192 Software Development Leaders from all industries of enterprise and the major challenges and business impact of their Software Development, Testing and Deployment constraints.

More specifically the research highlights:

The 8 market forces intensifying the challenge every day

The 5 major reasons that cause software delays

The key IT and business benefits of eliminating constraints

How to assess Service Virtualization technology and build a Business Case

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