Process

Each year we ask you, the readers, to tell us about your job, your experience, and your compensation. We then present our findings in a format that makes it easy to compare yourself to your peers. Check it out.

Excel does a great job as a spreadsheet, but when you try to push it into service as a database you may be in for some rude surprises.

Turn to The Last Word, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. This month, read why perhaps software should come equipped with seat belts and an air bag.

Code sandboxes of the world, unite behind a new leader: Continuous Integration (CI). Automated and customizable, CI gives you the ability to know at the push of a button whether your application is working or whether it needs a tweak. It brings together the disparate code of countless developers and provides a real-time gauge of your application's health. Never fear nightly (or, egads! weekly) builds again. Rely on the strength of CI.