Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

The first thing to understand: It is hard to build complex software that works well. In the search for salvation, or what software engineer and author Fred Brooks calls the silver bullet, many people look to models, techniques, and tools.

A public-domain online dictionary of terms used in UML. This is a very nice reference to understand at a high level how particular terms are used and related in UML.

Have you ever worked on a complex technology project that was completed on time? Probably not. And when a project is late, we usually feel bad about it, and the people who depend on us feel let down. The problem is that our intuition about scheduling is misleading us. It's all so avoidable -- if only we understand what's really going on, we can dramatically improve our ability to project schedules.

This article, by the director of the IBM Center for Software Engineering, examines 28 "best practices" which improve the effectiveness of software testing that have been identified in their research. They divide the practices into three categories (basic, foundational and incremental) based on the payback (largest to smallest). The most interesting aspect of the paper is that most of the practices are process and project related rather than things that the testing group itself does.

Sometimes I shudder when I think about having to do something in Unix. This site is an excellent reference for Unix commands and contains a number of useful "how-to" articles and a DOS-to-Unix command cross-reference.

The interest in XML comes especially from two directions: the Web, which is reaching the limits of HTML and SGML publishing, which is looking for a way onto the Web. This document addresses both groups of interest. It gives a short description of XML, its origin, its concepts and its purpose.

This is a training manual from one of WCG's testing equipment suppliers, TTC, which provides a good introduction to Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) which is one of the core technologies for Williams Network.

Engineers are sometimes in the position of being the bearers of bad news. An experienced engineer will not report a problem empty-handed -- it is always wise to have some idea of a solution to present to management. Nonetheless, finding a major problem that disrupts the execution of a project plan can make life difficult for an engineer.

Infinite bandwidth. Real-time provisioning. Are you ready for the new telecoms?

Revolutionary changes take years. Revolutions happen overnight. By those standards, the telecom industry is going through a revolution-a revolution at the speed of light. New optical gear due out in 2000 will fundamentally change the business of designing and delivering telecom services. And while carriers cope with implementing optical gear into their networks, network managers are free to sit on the sidelines and reap the rewards.

While telephone and cable companies fight for Web surfers' high-speed Internet dollars, the media industry--intent on delivering its content using its own means--is quietly building a new set of broadband networks.

A pioneering group of telecommunications executives has joined McLeodUSA Inc., an Iowa- based wholesale telecommunications company, and it is opening a Tulsa office in a bid to become a force in wholesale data and Internet services.

The big telephone companies have for months been unsuccessful in their attempts to persuade investors they deserve to be among the market's high-flying technology stocks. But as those stratospheric Internet-driven shares have come crashing to earth, the stodgier communications stocks are suddenly looking like a better bet, analysts say.

FreeMeter is a system tray utility that displays system statistics including drive space, CPU, page (virtual memory swap) file, and physical memory usage. It is highly customizable allowing you to choose what statistics to monitor, what items to display in the system tray, and the update frequency. This might be just the tool you need to unobtrusively monitor for application bottlenecks or memory leaks.

OnTop is a handy system tray utility which allows you to make any window (only one at a time, of course!) "Always On Top". Very useful for other utilities (such as, FreeMeter!) that you need to monitor periodically while doing other activities. In addition to adding "Always On Top" functionality to any application, it also has a "hide" feature which allows you to selectively hide application windows. This is nice when you have an application that you need to have running, but don't want it to take up space on the taskbar or task list.

Klik-A-Dir is a unique "floating" window application which allows you to quickly navigate to any directory on your system, including network drives. It allows you to, among other things, Open, Explore, or open a Command Prompt for any directory or, optionally, to launch an application program in those directories. The window can quickly be hidden and then accessed again via a system tray icon. (Note: It's a little slow with network directories, but works great for local hard drives.)

This is a very cool Java applet that allows you to adjust properties of a wire-frame model that "walks". Here's the description (and a "warning") from the site: