This paper is a set of presentation slides along with the associated commentary from a half-day course that Brian Marick (a recognized testing expert) gives to developers on testing techniques. It focuses on what is traditionally called unit and module integration testing with a few interesting and useful twists. This article is highly recommended.

If an IT project team doesn't understand the requirements for a system, it doesn't matter if it's using the latest object-oriented methodology or development tools. Ideally, the team could create a requirements document entirely on its own, but since systems are built at the request of business-unit end users, the document can't be created without their input. So, why not have the business users document the requirements, with the IT project team reviewing them for completeness and consistency?

The path to quality software begins with excellent requirements. Slighting the processes of requirements development and management is a common cause of software project frustration and failure. This article describes ten common traps that software projects can encounter if team members and customers don’t take requirements seriously. I describe several symptoms that might indicate when you’re falling victim to each trap, and I offer several solutions to control the problem.

Regardless of the technology involved, you need to synchronize changes to ensure the transactional integrity of your source.

This article lists the axioms, or truisms, related to software testing. Think of them as the "rules of the road" or the "facts of life" for software testing and software development. Each axiom is a little tidbit of knowledge that helps put some aspect of the overall software testing process into perspective.

Corporate it executives today face ever-increasing demands to show a return on information technology. In cost-benefit analysis, however, the cost of quality is seldom considered. But this is changing as the cost of quality (CoQ) principles applied routinely and effectively in manufacturing emerge as important factors in the application value equation. The "good" part of the good, fast, cheap equation is now getting its due along with improvement programs such as GE Information Services' Six Sigma enterprise-wide quality assurance program, total quality management (TQM) and the like.

Part of Norway's railways came to a standstill on New Year's Eve after the Millennium computer bug hit a year later than expected. The bug was discovered when none of the country's national railway's new 16 airport express trains or 13 high-speed, long-distance Signatur trains would start early in the morning of December 31.

With the weather getting cooler (colder?!), it's handy to have the shuttle schedule for those trips to between Williams office buildings.

This set of "cheat sheets" for Unix commands includes information for most of the common tasks that a typical Unix user would need, such as ls, cp, and ps. It includes concise descriptions of the commands and useful/relevant examples of each. Cheat sheets are provided in MS Word and Acrobat PDF format.

Shared services are handled by an organization that's been formed to consolidate and support redundant functions, such as accounts payable, for disparate business units. By leveraging economies of scale from a common IT infrastructure, such a group is able to market specific services to business units. [Editor's note: Article includes comments from WCG IT's own Andy Dail.]

Tera Term is a nice little freeware Telnet client. It's not fancy, but it's quite configurable and it usually gets the job done. Some of the nice features that it has over the standard Windows Telnet client are configurable scrollback buffer; user-selectable font style, size, and color; keyboard mapping (so "Delete" key really works!); saves list of hosts; multiple configuration file support; and KERMIT, XModem, and ZModem file transfer support.

EmailStripper is a free program for cleaning the ">" and other formatting characters out of your emails. It will restore "forwarded" or "replied" emails back to their original state so they're easier to read.

To add a document to the Work menu, open the desired document and select Add to Work Menu from the Work menu. The advantage of the Work menu over the Most Recently Used (MRU) files list on the File menu is that it is static and doesn't get overwritten when you open other documents. In addition to documents, you can add frequently used commands or macros to the Work menu (as well as any other menu!) by dragging the desired item from the Customize dialog to the desired location in the menu.