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In addition to presenting a tutorial and a keynote address at the EuroSTAR testing conference in Copenhagen, Lee Copeland was asked to give the after dinner speech at the closing gala reception overlooking Tivoli Gardens. He chose to model his comments after Robert Fulghum's book "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." But in his speech, Lee changes the rules of childhood into guidelines for living life as a tester.

Need to get the scoop on the latest software tests and trends? You've come to the right place. Get one reviewer's opinion of Canoo WebTest, an open source tool that supports Web application development through test automation.

What do you do when assigned the role of project customer, with a team that has never worked with a customer, building an application that was barely thought out? Sound like a nightmare? It doesn't have to be. Find out how one project manager beat the odds to produce a high-quality, on-time release.

Typical metrics are used to predict an outcome by comparing plans to actual results. They are objective and don't influence what you are trying to measure. Biased metrics, on the other hand, are a valuable tool for deliberately altering behavior to improve the performance of a group. Find out how biased metrics can be used on your projects to pinpoint problems in specific areas and to influence people to fix them.

We live in an online, wired world. The digital and physical worlds are so intertwined that almost nothing can happen unless the relevant applications are up and running.  You would think that as software applications become indispensable, they would likewise become more and more dependable. Instead, the rising tide of systems complexity and interdependency are making enterprise application problems inevitable, intractable, and more elusive.

A Build is defined as the process of compiling and executing any needed activity that makes up the process of creating your run-time Application. A Deployment is the task of packaging up and copying your run-time application to an environment in which the SCM stakeholders and ultimately the customer can access and run the application.

Feigning competence is human nature, but unveiling your ignorance about a subject may lead to myriad learning opportunities and an accelerated path toward craftsmanship. In this week's column, Dave Hoover shares a story of two consultants who found themselves on the same learning path, but learned different lessons as each dealt with his own limitations differently.