The Latest

More and more projects are being shipped overseas or outsourced to a contract company nowadays. However, managing an outsourced project is a risky task. Take home twelve hot tips that will help keep your project from getting burned. Ed Weller offers twelve tips to make your outsourcing experience better.

If you think that test automation is mostly about executing tests, then you're missing out on a big opportunity. Or rather, you're missing a lot of small opportunities adding up to a big one. Consider this: stop thinking about test automation as merely executing automated tests, stop thinking about test automation as something you need expensive tools for, and start discovering automation you can implement in a couple of days and usually with extremely inexpensive tools or tools you already have available. In this week's column, Danny Faught and James Bach suggest taking a more Agile approach to test automation.

Miracles seldom happen in the software industry, and that is what Big Bang transitions bank on. Utilizing such volatile quick-switch tactics often leave you with nothing more than a costly large crater, so why do some organizations still consider it an option? In this week's column, Peter Clark recognizes the potentially devastating effects of the approach and calls to disarm the process. But if you find yourself having to use the Big Bang, Peter gives tips on how to carefully avoid an accidental detonation.

The test automation architecture championed here is based on the idea of automation code as an application in its own right. Code reuse, encapsulation (on many levels), recursion, object-oriented concepts, testing maturity and usability (of automation by non-technical business analysts) are covered.

Test data has long been a challenge for testing; privacy legislation, identify theft, and the continued trend towards outsourcing has made it even worse. Just establishing and maintaining a comprehensive test environment can take half or more of all testing time and effort. In this column, Linda Hayes adds in the new and expanding privacy laws that inevitably limit your testing options. Yet from the quagmire of laws and company standards, better testing can emerge.

More and more companies are sending software development work offshore. While this practice allows companies to leverage an incredible talent pool at a lower cost, it poses significant challenges in managing projects. IT managers are struggling to perfect the process yet there is no proven way of managing offshore projects. In this article, Avi Verma presents a set of general guidelines for project and business managers to effectively manage offshore projects.

Risk Management is not a difficult task, but does require foresight. Sainath discusses identifying potential risks and charting an action plan to manage risks.