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There's no doubt that the current job market is tight and a little shaky for test professionals. In a climate where entire test groups are being laid off or trimmed to the bone, Johanna Rothman notices a trend in test management priorities that you might want to consider. Follow the story of how one test manager determined tester ROI and how testers might approach increasing their value.

Software measurement specialists are part of a long tradition of economic theorists, even if many don't recognize their ancestors. Notions of efficiency and how to model economic change are implicit in measurement strategies pursued. Software measurement is difficult because it requires a sophisticated understanding of how innovation can be fostered. Economic theorists have known for a long time that the short-run models do not capture the innovation that drives growth. Dr. Fado is a professional now involved in a software development metrics program, interested in making software measurement work for business benefit.

This article discusses the successful aspects of process improvement efforts that are not explicitly addressed by the CMM, but which are critical in achieving business and process improvement goals. It also summarizes the lessons learned by an organization that matured with these practices.

This article explains a set of six metrics, which collectively provide valuable insight into:

a) Effort variation
b) Assessing the organizational capability
c) Knowing how well the organization meets its commitments on time
d) Defect detection capability of QA&QC activities, hence control on price of conformance
e) Defect leakage across the phases of projects, organization wide
f) Productivity metrics - a sure input to scheduling

These six metrics are easy to understand and implement. The cost of implementation will be minimal, if the basic systems like time tracking and defect tracking systems are in place, and the organization follows a standard method for project size estimation.

In this paper, we describe "Self Verifying Data," a method that stores both the test data and the oracle in a single data set. Combining the data and oracle solves most of the expensive maintenance problems and makes verification simpler. This method easily scales to data sets of any size and it can be used with manual and automated testing. You can adapt Self Verifying Data principles to the data you use to test almost any kind of software application.

In this column, Bob Glass returns to a topic that stimulated a lot of discussion on this Web site in his previous column--the definition of software quality. Here, he responds to your comments, which totaled more than double the usual number. Bob stands his ground (with some clarifications) on what quality is…and isn't.

Perforce is recognized as the fast, low-overhead, high-throughput solution in software configuration management (SCM). What's not as obvious is how Perforce solves the problem of Web content management (WCM). Perforce is used in a wide range of WCM applications by: organizations using an intranet for internal documentation; companies whose product is Web content, not software; and individuals, companies, and organizations with external Web sites. This paper surveys the Perforce deployment models currently in use for web content management, and identifies the features that make Perforce a suitable WCM solution.