If you don’t sleep as well at The Benjamin Hotel as you do at home, Andy Labetti, General Manager for The Benjamin, will give you a free night’s stay. A good night’s sleep is non-negotiable. The Benjamin’s ‘Sleep Guarantee’ ensures that everyone who stays at the hotel walks away well rested or gets their money back. If a guest is dissatisfied with his or her sleep at The Benjamin, all they need to do is contact the front desk, and the hotel will refund the cost of their night’s stay.  Read the rest of this post

From RadioHead to restaurants, hotels, real estate, graphic design services, magazines, and even ballet performances, the idea of pay-what-you-like pricing has really been catching on. The viral nature of the pay-what-you-like pricing-scheme scheme has proven very successful for many companies. But why? How does it work? Nate Chenenko offers a unique service in the Washington, D.C. area as a bicycle taxi driver and has agreed to share some of his views on the subject of pay-what-you-like pricing. I hope you enjoy his guest post here on EdgeHopper about this interesting topic. Thanks Nate. (By the way, that’s Nate in the picture above)  Read the rest of this post

Are software companies knowingly releasing buggy, defect-ridden software intentionally? In the words of Sarah Palin, “You betcha!” I’m not saying that they release bad software with malice. It’s more about the cost equation associated with fixing the defects. I was talking with Tom Poppendieck at the ADP Conference last week and here’s how he explains the costs associated with fixing defects:  Read the rest of this post

• Fix it now: The effort to fix a defect as soon as your developer types the wrong code is pressing Ctrl-Z (UNDO!). Cost is essentially ZERO. And if you’re pair programming, you’re very likely to catch the defect at this point.

In the past few weeks I’ve been asked about and have been considering exactly how to fit QA and testing into a two week iteration. A primary concern of the folks I’ve been talking with is that QA’s and testers on an agile team have nothing to do at the start of an iteration. The second concern is that we can’t keep writing new code up until the last minute of an iteration if QA is to adequately test the code, and as such, what do the developers do at the end of the iteration. Of course, the underlying concern in both of these cases is keeping the QA’s and the devlopers effectively utilized during an iteration. Software quality always seems to boil down to a utilization/cost equation doesn’t it? Well, after giving it some thought, I think I’ve come with a basic schedule for QA’s and developers over a two week iteration. Here’s the plan:  Read the rest of this post