Examine how Information Technology (IT) asset management methodologies can reduce your organization's IT budget between five and thirty-five percent. Kathy Shoop discusses the critical components to deploy, the challenges of implementing such a program, and the limitations of asset management tools such as spreadsheets and in-house development efforts. Discover the best practices for implementing an asset management initiative in your organization that will result in immediate cost savings.

Action Word Testing. This concept illuminates testing as an action, a process, an art. Learn how Action Word Testing can be applied to deal with critical test issues such as lack of functional knowledge of a system under test; instability of the design during test development; and automation of 100% of the functional or technical tests. Hans Buwalda uses a financial exchange that's introduced a new electronic trading system to demonstrate Action Word Testing (approximately 15,000 tests). In this example, automation of the entire test was essential, but it was difficult to achieve.

It's impossible to test everything-even in the most trivial of systems. Tight time schedules and shortages of trained testing personnel exacerbate this problem; so do changing priorities, feature creep, and loss of resources. In many companies, test professionals either begin their work on whichever components they encounter first, or the parts they're most familiar with. Unfortunately, these approaches may result in the delivery of a system where the most critical components remain untested. Or, at the very least, critical components are tested later in the lifecycle when there may not be time to fix the problems found. All of this adds to the risk of a project. One way to overcome every one of these challenges is to employ the use of risk analysis. Rick Craig demonstrates the basics of a usable process for assigning testing priorities based on relative risk.

In software development, thirty to forty percent of all software activities are testing related. That is why it is critical to launch test activities at the beginning of the project rather than after coding is completed. Based on the Vmodel, this paper describes a model that shows how the tasks for testing relate to the tasks in the development model. This testing model-the W-model further clarifies the priority of the tasks and the dependence between the development and testing activities. Though as simple as the V-model, the W-model makes the importance of testing and the ordering of the individual testing activities clear. It also clarifies that testing and debugging are not the same thing.