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Growing Your Career in Tough Times

In these tough economic times, many testers can't access formal training. In this column, testing consultant Fiona Charles describes the wealth of low- or no-dollar resources available for professional development and invites readers to share their ideas.

Fiona Charles's picture Fiona Charles
A Leader Among Followers

We hear that for an effective organization to smoothly evolve and develop there should only be one leader and many followers. The reality is that the majority of most organizations are followers. Since an effective follower is critical to an organization and its ability to accomplish a mission, this article discusses what makes an effective follower.

Laura Rose
Fire Hydrant Lessons in Communication

A while ago we got a notice that the town would be installing a fire hydrant near our house. OK, fine. Weeks went by with no information about when it would happen. Then one Wednesday my husband was outside and saw a guy doing some marking and measuring. They started chatting. The guy said they'd be doing the installation two days later, on Friday. And almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that they'd be turning off our water for the duration.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
Change Management is not Change Control

A key part of planning configuration management for our projects is determining how we will manage change. After all, change happens and any good configuration manager is concerned with how it is managed. Unfortunately, more often than not, our processes focus more on controlling change than on managing it. That is, we put a lot of effort into trying to keep change from happening and relatively less effort into ensuring that when (not if, but when) change happens, we manage it effectively.

Alan S. Koch
Avoiding Disaster: Get Your Team to Plan for Configuration Management

Poor planning is the root cause of many problems. Planning for configuration management can significantly impact your organization's productivity and effectiveness. Many teams live in a constant treadmill of responding to emergencies that could have easily been avoided with a little bit of planning. Some people just don't have the ability or demeanor to create an adequate plan, while others don't even want to. In technology, many professionals excel at responding to crisis after crisis and become known for their skills in "saving the day." At the other end of the spectrum are professionals who plan and plan but cannot find the right balance between planning and action. Fixating on creating a plan is just as deadly as having no plan at all. Technology managers need to be able to recognize the personality traits that make for good planners in their team and provide leadership to get the job done in an effective way.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Lessons for Environmentally Friendly Configuration Management

Learn how addressing the future of configuration manager as an environmentalist looks at the future of planet Earth can help you be ready for change, without ignoring what still must be done today. Chayim Kirshen shows you in this article how to both of these tasks in this article.

Anonymous
How to Build a Configuration Management Plan

If you're planning a configuration management (CM) project, it's time to build a CM Plan. Joe Farah writes on on a number of areas that need to be addressed in your plan in order to follow software configuration management (SCM) best practices.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
Leave No Stones Unturned

Every test manager's nightmare is finding out that not enough testing has been done. And the paradox lies in the fact that enough testing often comes with a heavy tag in terms of cost and efforts. The real challenge is to get the optimum quality at the lowest cost.

Mihir Kamdar's picture Mihir Kamdar
Application Lifecycle Management Tools with Matthew Klassen

Matthew Klassen is a solutions manager with MKS. In this interview, an excerpt of which appeared in the August 13, 2009 issue of the Sticky ToolLook eNewsletter, he discusses some of the difficulties and benefits of adapting application lifecycle management tools.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Installing a Web Application to an Existing IIS Website using Wix3

This article describes a detailed procedure for installing a new web application on an existing IIS website, when Wix3 is used to create the msi file. This can be a common requirement in a large deployment. However, I find it's a lot of work to actually get it done,

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor

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