Hype is not unknown in the software field. The advocates of every new software idea exaggerate the benefits of using that idea. Those exaggerated claims generally have no basis in reality. In this week's column, Robert Glass explains his theory about Open Source Software.

Due to shrinking budgets, organizations have scaled back testing beyond the point of acceptable risk. Some companies have eliminated QA resources altogether, pushing testing responsibilities back onto programming staff, which is itself spread too thinly to get it done. Unfortunately, this means that software (and even some hardware) is being released in an untested state. It's important to ask who is doing the testing on your project to ensure the testing is being done at all.

Software quality assurance is a planned and systematic approach necessary to provide adequate confidence that an item or product conforms to established standards, procedures, and policies. This paper addresses the quality assurance practices that were employed in the organization to assure "quality" of software product development. It describes the practices that can be effectively adopted both at the project level and organization level. Defect metric data which has been collected out of this endeavor is also presented.

During testing, testers mostly stress the 'Bold' part of the software and comfortably overlook the 'Beautiful' side. Beauty and functionality are treated as two extreme ends in software quality, where only one of the two can meet perfection at a given time. But the viewers of the famous soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful know very well that both are important. In this article, Yogita Sahoo explains why aesthetics are such an important contribution.