Is your company experiencing difficulty and frustration with its offshore project teams? Are your teams not consistently performing well? Are the results not what was expected? Gerie Owen shares her experiences in managing offshore test teams through each phase of the project cycle-from selecting the team and executing the project through presenting and documenting its results. Gerie explains how to assess the team’s knowledge and skill level. Because your offshore team members often are new to you, it is critical to recognize and handle training issues as early as possible. With the challenges of time zones, language, and cultural differences, Gerie addresses the critical issues of providing explicit direction and expressing clear expectations.

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, ineffective management practices when dealing with planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting as a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits-and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are: mishandling employee incentives; attempting to make key decisions by consensus; ignoring processes and releasing too early; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified-but whom everyone likes. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, you’ll take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these software management habits-or better yet, avoiding them altogether.

Managers play a critical role in the success or failure of test automation. Although most testers and some test managers have a realistic view of what automation can and cannot do, many senior managers have firm ideas about automation that are misguided—or downright wrong.

Most of us grew up wanting to be firemen or astronauts or teachers-not testers. Eric Jacobson, an average guy and not incredibly technical, loves software testing and his career in testing as much as his dog loves him. Using videos and candid photos of his test team at work, Eric shares the top ten skills and practices he’s developed and honed over the years to make himself a test leader. He explains how he helps his team establish reasonable goals and then meet them. Find out why testing broadly first and deeper later keeps the programmer busy and takes some of the guesswork out of test estimation. Watch Eric as he shows you how to use white boarding to explore technical systems and help programmers find their own mistakes. Take back to work ten ideas you can employ immediately to help you be the tester your dog thinks you are.