Here are five frequently asked questions that every PM needs to read:

Let’s face it- 24 hours in a day seems limiting. After all, you have deadlines, coworkers to manage, and a looming project. How do the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all their responsibilities, have enough time to accomplish their goals?  One common characteristic of very successful people is excellent time management skills. By not learning or employing time management techniques, you are not working efficiently as possible.

We will go over five time management tips that will hopefully save you time, money and increase your efficiency. They say it takes three weeks of repetition to make an action a habit-what are you waiting for!? Start practicing the time management skills shown below.

#1) Track your daily activity

What is an Issue and Why Must You Track it?

In software development, an Issue or Bug is a glitch in your software system that causes the program to behave in a way other than designed. Issues can range from the show stopper, a fatal error that causes irreparable damage to your software system, to the very minor glitch. Obviously, each issue in the system is not going to have the same importance, or urgency, attached to it. Critical issues, the show stoppers mentioned above, need to be solved first before you can do anything else. Lower urgency issues are the minor ones, which you or your team can put off until time permits. There are tons of other details, that are relevant to the fate of your software, to keep track of like who experienced the issue (was it a customer or someone within the company), when was the bug found, what exactly was it that the user experienced (in order to be solved, this needs to be extremely detailed!), what solutions were attempted, and much more.

An issue tracking system or tool will manage and maintain your lists of issues. Organizations commonly use Issue tracking systems in their customer support call centers to create, assign, update, track and resolve reported issues. These issues could come from customers directly, or even from the organization's other (non IT) employees. An issue tracking system will often also contain a knowledge base, which stores information on each customer, fixes for common problems, and other important and useful data.

Principle Three: Prioritize

You’d be surprised at how much time you, and your development team, are wasting by not assigning priority and severity to every task.  Issues come in, bugs are discovered, and new application features are conceived of every day. Every item won’t be crucial to fulfilling your business goal, but your team has no way of concretely which tasks are most important to the company unless someone in management tells them.  Priority tells your team how important it is that they resolve this issue immediately.  Assigning priority and enforcing it, whenever any task or issue is assigned, will make your team work more efficiently.  

Setting priority is akin to designating a time slot for every task that you assign a team member during the day.  Urgent issues and tasks are certain to be tackled first thing in the morning, with low priority items waiting until later on when all others have been completed. With a clear idea of which tasks, issues or tests are most important, your team members can easily plan their days to make the best use of their time.  Think about your own work habits.  Without prioritizing, it’s easy to get caught up in busy work, fielding every new issue that comes in.  But just because an issue was the last one to cross your desk doesn’t make it the most important. Now think about how you structure your own to-do list? If you think that something is critical, but potentially time consuming,are you more or less likely to put it first on your list? However, if you KNOW that this thing is of highest importance to your boss, does it move up on your to-do list?

Let’s face it- 24 hours in a day seems limiting. After all, you have deadlines, coworkers to manage, and a looming project. How do the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all their responsibilities, have enough time to accomplish their goals?  One common characteristic of very successful people is excellent time management skills. By not learning or employing time management techniques, you are not working efficiently as possible. 

We will go over five time management tips that will hopefully save you time, money and increase your efficiency. They say it takes three weeks of repetition to make an action a habit-what are you waiting for!? Start practicing the time management skills shown below.

#1) Track your daily activity

Let’s face it- 24 hours in a day seems limiting. After all, you have deadlines, coworkers to manage, and a looming project. How do the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, with all their responsibilities, have enough time to accomplish their goals?  One common characteristic of very successful people is excellent time management skills. By not learning or employing time management techniques, you are not working efficiently as possible. 

We will go over five time management tips that will hopefully save you time, money and increase your efficiency. They say it takes three weeks of repetition to make an action a habit-what are you waiting for!? Start practicing the time management skills shown below.

#1) Track your daily activity

Software bugs are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually, or about 0.6 % of the gross domestic product.i An estimated $22.2 billion could be saved annually in the U.S. just by implementing an improved testing infrastructure to enable earlier and more effective identification, and
removal, of software defects!

These are large numbers, for sure. You’re probably thinking that since this cost is spread out over the entire U.S. economy, that the impact isn’t all too staggering. However, think about what 0.6% of your company’s annual revenues are! That’s probably a fairly large number; now imagine that you could prevent the loss of almost half that number simply by improving your software testing process. Testing is what ensures that your software application is of the high quality that your customers want. It’s what makes sure that the product you send out the door is consistent with your business goals. This is a HUGE piece of the software development lifecycle (SDLC); testing typically consumes 40 – 50% of any development project, and even more effort is needed for systems requiring a higher level of reliability.

http://www.elementool.com/ebook/SoftwareTestingMethods.pdf

Building test cases is about doing your best to find the worst in a program in order to deliver a quality product to thecustomer. Without a well-designed and executed test plan, the results can be catastrophic and very costly. For example,because of an error in the software, the first flight of the Ariane 5 rocket resulted in its complete destruction and the loss of four satellites at a cost of more than $370 million.

In the U.S. alone, software bugs cost the economy $59 billion2 back in 2002. Clearly, software defects must be found and corrected before unleashing new programs to the customer.

This article provides you with a basic understanding of software test cases. In addition, the article describes proven methods for building test cases that uncover the most defects with the minimum of time, effort and money.