In this short interview with editor Joey McAllister, Steve Berczuk offers some tips to organizations dealing with configuration management (CM) issues.

Multitasking is often seen as a desirable skill—you can buy books or pay to attend courses that will teach you how to do it—but it is a surprisingly debilitating idea.

Geographically Distributed Development (GDD) is a common strategy in the software world today. Organizations are gaining experience in developing software globally and are discovering that the competitive demand for best-in-class, high quality applications requires greater agility in quality management. Unfortunately, IT budgets are not keeping up with the staff required for quality management and the response is to accelerate quality management by leveraging global teams. This article compares and contrasts agile GDD testing strategies for affecting quality management.

One of the Holy Grails of automated quality toolsets is a fully integrated suite that seamlessly tracks the process all the way from requirements to test cases and on through to defect tracking. This fully integrated suite makes for a great marketing pitch and sexy slideware, but in Linda Hayes' experience its functionality usually stops there. The leap from theory to practice seems to fall short, and it makes her wonder whether the concept of a fully integrated suite is fundamentally flawed or if it's just the implementation that needs attention. In this column, she begins her investigation by studying two test cases to decide whether these experiences are anomalies or the rule.