Praise often turns losers into winners.
–Unknown
Appreciation is a wonderful thing:
it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. –Voltaire
Smaller teams put added pressure on everyone involved. This article discusses some approaches to easing the burden.
This is an excellent article detailing how to prepare relevant and testable non-functional requirements, such as performance specifications.
The author makes a strong case for the importance of IT goals and work being aligned with the business objectives and he discusses how a sound "enterprise architecture" can help.
Although requirements gathering and analysis are often not the most enjoyable and rewarding aspects of development projects, this article discusses why they are so important and how to make them more productive.
This article give a tongue-in-cheek approach of some things to avoid on projects with the goal of helping you to avoid them.
This list provides some simple, straightforward ideas for a successful software testing effort and program.
An article which gives some good guidelines for selecting useful test data for test cases and procedures.
This article emphasizes the importance of testing some of the less obvious areas of a system, such as documentation and training.
This series of articles takes from the basics of multitable joins in SQL to the inner (no pun intended) workings of inner, outer and self joins.
Taking your hands off of the keyboard to use the mouse to select a menu item or press a toolbar button can significantly slow down your work (and sometime break your train of thought). Take advantage of myriad of function key shortcuts available in MS Word on this list. (Note: Although this list is specifically for MS Word 2000, most of the shortcuts are valid in MS Word 97, as well.)
This site has dozens of tutorials on many IT topics ranging from programming to SQL to general networking principles.
Most of the WCG business model is based on the concept of fiber optic communications. This article explains the basics, including some simple physics, of how fiber optics works.
This article examines the PC revolution that Intel unknowingly sparked when it introduced the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, over 30 years ago.
Much of the bandwidth needs today are driven by the emergence of the World Wide Web as the preeminent communications medium. Read this interview with the first American to post a document to the Web over 10 years ago.
This article discusses the failure of Excite@Home and other broadband carriers of the last year. It points out that strong infrastructure is the key to telecom success.
Textractor is a nifty utility that can capture/log all text written to the screen by an application. This is useful for those testing situations where you need to track screen output, but don't want to save a large collection of screenshots. It also helps when an application writes something to the screen that flashes by before you can read it.
CloseIEx adds two buttons to your Internet Explorer (IE) toolbar: one to close all instances of IE and another to close all instances except the one that you are using. This is handy for web applications to open many windows and for removing those pop up and "pop under" advertising windows.
If you
need to add worksheets to an Excel workbook (document), typically, you
use the Insert | Worksheet main menu command. A much faster
way to do this is to simply press <Shift>+<F11> and Excel
will add a new blank worksheet before (in front of) whichever sheet
you were working on at the time. Also, in Excel you can the default
number of worksheets per workbook to one (to save disk space!) by selecting
Tools | Options… from the main menu. Select the
General tab in the Options window and change
Sheets in new workbook to 1. Press
OK to save your change.
To improve
efficiency, MS Word provides an extensive collection of keyboard shortcuts
that you can use to perform common operations. You can easily print
a list of these keyboard shortcuts as a quick reference guide. To do
so, choose File | Print from the main menu. In the
Print dialog box, choose Key Assignments from the
Print What dropdown list, and then press
OK. Word will print a multi-page table that lists the keyboard
shortcuts (if any) assigned to each command, as well as the corresponding
menu and menu for the command, if you prefer to use the mouse.
When you're
working with a document that will undergo several draft stages before
it's finalized, it's often a good idea to maintain an audit trail in
case you ever need to review earlier drafts. Rather than saving each
draft of a document as a separate file, use the Versions feature to
save each draft within the same document. Using the Versions feature
to save drafts results in a smaller overall file size than saving each
draft as a separate file and the hassle of having to name the versions
of your document. To manually save the current version of your document,
choose File | Versions from the main menu bar. In the
Versions dialog box, press Save Now. When prompted, provide
a comment that will help you to differentiate the version from others
after you've saved it, and then click
OK. To automatically save a version of the current document each
time you close it, choose File | Versions from the main menu,
select the Automatically Save A Version On Close check box, and
then press Close. The next time you close the document, Word
saves it as a new version within the same file. To open a previous version
of your document, choose File | Versions from the menu bar to
open the Versions dialog box. Select the version you'd like
to open in the Existing Versions list box, and then press
Open. (Note: When making revisions to a previous version of your
document, you'll need to save the modified version as a separate file
in order to preserve the changes.)