The Latest

The High Cost of Employee Turnover among Project Managers[article]

Nothing can be more frustrating for a business manager than having to deal with employee turnover. High or low, it is detrimental to your organization. The reality is that the demand for experienced project managers is on the rise, yet less experienced personnel seem to be attracted to the profession. This is part of the reason why project managers are not always effective at their job--they simply are not properly trained in the field. While turnover among project managers is a serious problem, it simply goes undetected in many organizations. Most CEO's and managers accept it as part of the cost of doing business. But successful managers recognize the staggering costs that turnover can have and try to work to lower it as much as possible. This informative article covers the many potential causes for turnover among project managers, how to cope with it, measure it, and hopefully decrease it over time.

Thomas J. Mattus
Free time Free Time is Not Free[article]

Unpaid overtime has negative personal and business consequences. Although regarded as free time by many organizations, there is a true business cost to not estimating or counting overtime hours, whether paid or not. Ed Weller presents the argument that those who do not count free time in their planning and tracking will make poor decisions and often invest in the wrong projects.

Ed Weller's picture Ed Weller
Web Services API Testing[presentation]

Traditionally, test engineers have had some type of a visual user interface for testing client/server and Web applications.

Papa Acquah, LexisNexis
Peanuts and Crackerjacks: What Baseball Taught Me about Metrics[presentation]

Because people can easily relate to a familiar paradigm, analogies are an excellent way to communicate complex data.

Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
Face-off: Stuctured Testing vs. Exploratory Testing and Error Guessing[presentation]

Exploratory testing and error guessing are valuable functional testing techniques. Like all other methods, though, they have limitations partly because they are based on the knowledge, experience, and intuition of the test engineer.

William Rollison, Microsoft Corporation
Developing an Error-Based Testing Strategy[presentation]

For more complete testing, you need to find and simulate possible error conditions in a system. Many methods throw exceptions when an error occurs.

Chris Shelley, Dell, Inc.
Manage Your Testing with SCRUM[presentation]

Used successfully in hundreds of agile and iterative development projects, SCRUM is a software project management approach that employs fixed cycle time "sprints" and daily "scrums." SCRUM emphasizes self-directing teams and the role of a "Sc

Robert Galen, Thomson/Dialog
"Risk" Is a Tester's Favorite Four-Letter Word[presentation]

Good project managers speak the language of risk. Their understanding of risk guides important decisions. Testers can contribute to an organization’s decision-making ability by speaking that same language.

Julie Gardiner, QST Consultants Ltd.
Achieving Meaningful Metrics from Your Test Automation Tools[presentation]

In addition to the efficiency improvements you expect from automated testing tools, you can-and should-expect them to provide valuable metrics to help manage your testing effort.

Jack Frank, Mosaic Inc
Inside the Explorer's Notebook[presentation]

Exploratory testing is more than just thinking of clever test ideas and executing them on a whim.

Jon Bach, Quardev, Inc
Strive for Quality in System Testing: A Top 10 List[presentation]

Finding non-functional, system level problems before a system is delivered-and early enough to allow for low cost corrections-is a perennial testing issue.

Jerry Cobry, IBM Corporation
Legal Compliance in Quality Assurance[presentation]

In many industries, we must comply with state or federal statutes, government regulations, and other legal standards. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) has brought a new awareness to these issues within testing.

Elle Ringham, Fidelity National Financial
Test Driven Development (TDD) for Secure Applications[presentation]

Test Driven Development (TDD) has emerged as a successful productivity technique for development teams.

James Whittaker, Florida Institute of Technology
Rapid Bottleneck Identification for Successful Load Testing[presentation]

Rapid bottleneck identification is a methodology that allows QA professionals to very quickly uncover Web application limitations and determine what impact those limitations have on the enduser experience.

Joe Fernandes, Empirix
FitNesse: An Open-Source Tool for Acceptance Testing[presentation]

Testing is a critical aspect of agile development methods. In the acceptance testing process, testers and customers write the automated tests before the code is developed.

Micah Martin, Object Mentor

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