Only two things of interest in the December 1, 2007 edition of SD Times

  • Activestate’s IDE has been opensourced; Open Komodo. Of course, the useful stuff like a debugger, regex tool and an html inspector have been flagged as ‘only available in the commercial release’. It’s a start though.
  • One of the things I recommend people consider when evaluating tools is to see how they integrate together. Perforce (my favorite version control system) has announced an SDK so customers can integrate their bug systems with perforce even if they have are using a not-yet-supported-product or have built your own inhouse. See the P4DTG page for more details.

This big thing in the December 2007 issue of Software Test & Performance is the annual Testers Choice awards. Interesting to see all the big commercial vendors cleaning house which I suppose is an indicator of the typical audience for this publication. I’ve updated my Testers Choice post to include the winner of each category. The other article of interest is “GUI Bloopers: Common User Interface Blunders and How to Avoid Them” which debunks several common excuses developers use to justify skipping usability testing. I just skimmed it right now but I’m an advocate of usability testing in general so it is getting highlighted.