Principles Trump Diagrams. Most of the problems in using the 1988 spiral model stemmed from users looking at the diagram and constructing processes that had nothing to do with the underlying concepts. This is true of many process models: people just adopt the diagram and neglect the principles that need to be respected.

Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management. This month you will find some interesting information and opinions about managing software developers, software architecture, Agile testing, product owner patterns, mobile testing, continuous improvement, project planning and technical debt.

When software features are distributed on multiple infrastructures (server, mobile, cloud) that needs to communicate and synchronize, having a sound and reactive software architecture is a key for success and evolution of business functions.

Methods & Tools – the free e-magazine for software developers, testers and project managers – has just published its Winter 2014 issue that discusses Agile Analysis, Self-Selecting Teams,Collaborative Development of Domain-specific Languages, TDD with Mock Objects, BDDfire.

Here is our monthly selection of interesting knowledge material on programming, software testing and project management.  This month you will find some interesting information and opinions about slow programming, technical career paths, Agile QA, Scrum backlog refinement meetings, being a better test manager, java BDD, mixing Waterfall and Agile, the TDD cycle and dealing with bad Java code.

Stories shouldn’t be small because they need to fit into an iteration, but because the world shouldn’t end just because a story turns out to be wrong. Stories are based on assumptions about business value, and those assumptions might turn out to be right or wrong.

Here is a list of software development related conferences and events on Agile ( Scrum, Lean, Kanban) software testing and software quality, programming (Java, .NET, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, PHP) and databases (NoSQL, MySQL, etc.) that will take place in the coming weeks and that have media partnerships with the Methods & Tools software development magazine.