A cautionary tale on how estimates are often based on wishful thinking and poor communication with both stakeholders and programmers.

You can't help but look on estimation as one more piece of annoying, bureaucratic paperwork obstacle placed between you and the joys of actually building the application. So you'll be sorely tempted to throw together some guesstimates based on past experience and a vague work-breakdown structure. And then you don't get around to revising the estimates until there's a surprise—and a crisis.

Technological advancements and government deregulation unleashed a whirlwind of new developments in the telecom industry. Companies best suited to withstand the storm provide some valuable lessons for any industry grappling with the overwhelming pace of change.

No one working in the telecom industry 10 or 20 years ago could have foreseen the changes that recently swept the industry. The government deregulation that occurred in 1997 completely turned the complacent and consistent world of the local exchange company monopoly upside down. Deregulation lead to a technological explosion that released consumers from copper wire chains, allowing them to get local calling features and Internet service over cable lines and wireless phones. And in the last three years, rounds of merger mania have brought new changes to every facet of the industry.

Roll out as many tools as you'd like, but without understanding your Information delivery life cycle, they'll add only limited value

User-friendly reporting and analysis tools, Internet and intranet applications, server farms full of rich databases, and increasingly accessible mainframes are all making corporate data more valuable than ever. In fact, corporate information stores are often a company’s largest asset. But even with all the rich tools available, the process of delivering useful information still offers significant opportunities for adding value.

An independent (not affiliated with Continuus Corp.) site dedicated to providing scripts, tips, and FAQs about the Continuus SCM tool. The site also includes question and answer forums.

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A project manager strides purposefully into your office. "JB, this disk has the latest and greatest release of our software. Please test it." You say "OK, OK. What does it do?" The manager stops in his tracks and says "Uh, the usual stuff..." Sound familiar? We've run into this situation as employees and as consultants. We've seen testers take the disk, stick it in the drive, and just start testing away. That's testing in the dark. We think there are approaches that are more productive. When we test or manage testers, we plan the testing tasks to know what value we can get from the testing part of the project. Let's try turning on the lights!

Requirements, if they are to be at all useful, must be measurable. That is, they must be given quantifiable characteristics so that testers can accurately determine whether the eventual solution satisfies a requirement, and so that the client can determine if the requirement's value is worth the cost of construction.

One of Microsoft's original design goals for NT 4.0 was to eliminate the seemingly endless number of interacting parameters that you had to set to optimize your system. To accomplish this, Microsoft incorporated adaptive algorithms into NT so that it can change values for these parameters as it runs. This self-tuning reduces the need for manual adjustment, but doesn't eliminate it. As you manage your NT system, two powerful forces pull you in opposite directions. The first is your desire to optimize your system and make it perform better. The second is the common sense that reminds you that if it isn't broken, you shouldn't fix it. But with care, it's possible to balance these forces, taking precautions to avoid disaster while making small changes to boost performance.

An online, interactive course in SQL (structured query language). One of the unique features of this tutorial is that it provides a live database which you can practice with and actually run DDL commands and queries, inserts, and updates on.

ASCIIcat is a standard Windows Help format "paperless book" with a cornucopia of useful reference information. Originally conceived as a quick reference to the ASCII character set, it has grown to include units of measure and conversion tables, English grammar and usage style guide, basic US and world geography guide, Windows color reference, and much more. This handy little (less that 250kB extracted) reference is fast and very well organized. You'll find it invaluable.

BlueJ is a freeware integrated development environment (IDE) for Java designed specifically for teaching and learning object-oriented application design using Java. It includes built-in graphical and text-based editor, compiler, VM, debugger, and class browser, including a graphical class structure display. The most important (from a learning perspective) feature is that it supports interactive execution so that progress and results can be examined.

Get ready for optical switching in the telecommunications network backbone, then an all-optical Internet, and finally optical integrated circuits. The amount of data we can get almost anywhere will skyrocket.

With the demise of Sprint and WorldCom's merger imminent, new telecommunications merger deals may be simmering. This time around, analysts say there may be more companies willing to put themselves on the block than telecommunications titans that are willing to buy. Many of the midsized companies in the market have already merged to the point where they're too expensive for any except the biggest international giants to acquire them, and the giants now have the chance to be selective.

$1 billion initiative aimed at putting carrier in the big leagues

If Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil was excited about $1 million, he’d be in awe over Williams Communications’ latest announcement. The company last week said it will spend $1 billion during the next few years to build several new data centers, expand its co-location facilities, scale its IP network and purchase additional transport and switching equipment.

TULSA, Okla. -- A decade ago, Tulsa was a played out oil-and-gas town. Today, the town's boosters have recast it in the role of telecommunications superpower. The area has more than 54,000 high-technology jobs, which account for roughly 8 percent of local employment, a share that matches well-known technology centers like Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Dallas; and Stamford, Conn. In the next three years, a recent survey of area employers shows, the region is expected to add as many as 6,000 positions in telecommunications alone.

Gordon Martin, a former executive at Tulsa-based Williams Communications Group Inc., has been named chief executive officer of America's Fiber Network, a new super-regional high-speed fiber-optics network that will be based in Tulsa.

For many start-up makers of communications equipment, all roads lead to Tulsa. This is home to Williams Communications Group Inc., a new-era long- distance network that is making a name as a big buyer of innovative equipment. More than a half-dozen start-ups list Williams as among their first customers. In the tight-knit telecommunications world, a Williams purchase order has become a key reference for recruiting other customers and a big boost toward a successful initial public offering.

QCD provides fast directory navigation (Windows NT only) and graphical drive usage statistics (Windows 95/98 and NT). With fast directory navigation, you no longer need to type in those lengthy paths to get to some far-off directory. Just type in any name or partial name of a directory anywhere on your entire drive and QCD will take you straight there... fast!. If there is more than one match, QCD will display a list of possible directories, allowing you to choose. The other great feature of QCD is the graphical drive usage display. With QCD, you can graph the usage of your entire drive in terms of bytes used, bytes allocated, file counts, or directory counts.

FastFolders is an extremely useful system tray application that provides quick access to frequently used folders/directories. It allows you to select your "favorities", as well as providing easy access to "special" folders including Recent Documents and Startup and to all drives including network drives.

Tired of typing in all of the text from error message dialogs when testing? Pickup Window is a handy little utility that can help. Simply launch this utility and drag the "magic wand" over the desired window or message box. The edit field in the Pickup Window main window will contain the text including CR/LFs (if any). Just select it and copy it to the clipboard to paste into your problem report. Other features of Pickup Window include screen magnifier, window resizer, window color spy, and more. [Note: This program seems somewhat buggy (run-time errors, etc.), but it's still quite useful.]

You want to be educated in the ways of the world. What better way than to read some of the classics. But you're awfully busy, too! You don't even have time to read the Cliff's Notes. Well, here's the solution: Book-A-Minute. It has entire classic literature condensed into just a few lines. This is truly a funny site!

This site is an online history of computing. It features both hardware and software advances. The site offers some unique, unbiased perspectives on the evolution of computing and "how we got here" in the Information Age.