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Town crier, elevator operator, gas lamp lighter, carbon paper distributor, telegraph operator—you probably haven't seen many help wanted ads for these occupations lately. Why? Because these occupations are gone—obsolete, unnecessary, outdated. We just don't need them anymore. When new paradigms are created, new jobs are often created with them. And sometimes, existing jobs are no longer relevant.

Virtual Lab Automation (VLA) is a ground-breaking technology that promises quantifiable benefits for application development and test organizations, including faster lab deployment, less manual setup work, greater resource flexibility and utilization, and easier reproduction of defects. In this article, Skytap's Ian Knox discusses the best practices and common pitfalls associated with adopting a VLA solution. In addition, he outlines the steps to evaluate a virtualization solution for your test organization and provides further resources to help you get started.

This report focuses on the importance of monitoring during testing. The author draws his thesis from experience and supports his claim with three case studies.

Too many technology projects fail to deliver the promised value, and some do not deliver at all. Traditional project management methods when applied to software initiatives continue to frustrate financial professionals and offer poor risk mitigation. In the current economic environment, businesses are forced to reduce their capital budgets and cannot afford to make significant investments without more certainty of appropriate return.

Lisa Crispin explains in this article how CI has become an absolute necessity for any software development team in this day and age. For those who have yet to fully embrace CI, this article gives you some great reasons you should, along with some helpful resources to get you started.

Computing nerds bring value to any company for which they work. They bring knowledge and an understanding of systems and projects that can help managers avoid bad decisions. But the computing nerd in this stage still has room for growth. In this week's column, Payson Hall says there's a higher level of value computing nerds can achieve. And, in today's economic environment, this level is far more valuable than ever before.

Agile is a development strategy that we have worked with for a number of years now. Lately, we've been getting a lot of questions from clients along the lines of: "I've got a project, I want to globally source it, can I use Agile Development?"

Well, that depends.