SDTimes – December 15, 2007
The only thing of note is Building Security into Source Code which talks to a number of security static analysis vendors who (no surprise) say that you should run their tools during the build.

SDTimes – January 1, 2008

  • Agile Principles Are Changing Everything is a great article which looks at the state of Agile in the enterprise. It also has a term I have never seen before. Wagile – using agile techniques in a waterfall manner. Fantastic! This is absolutely being added to my lexicon.
  • What Do Your Metrics Say To You? starts with a great line: “Companies are spending a great deal of energy and money on gathering useless metrics and data around application development projects”. The article is about a study Borland commissioned and amazingly doesn’t promote one of their products to solve the issues they found. Overall it is a pretty critical look at the value of most of the metrics people use.
  • Ironically, a couple pages later was a product release announcement for JetBrains TeamCity which “helps managers get a visual idea of their team’s build metrics”. For those of you who worship at the alter of the green bar, this might be of interest
  • There is a nice comparison of some of the Pros / Cons involved in the WS-* vs. REST debate in How Much REST Do We Need?
  • David S. Linthicum looks at Information Integration Patterns in the context of SOA in his article this issue. Why is this important? “… those who don’t consider the information and just layer services on top of dysfunctional and poorly structured data will end up with a very inefficient architecture” which is something you want to try to avoid when wearing a QA hat (vs. the tester-only hat).

Software Test & Performance – January 2008

  • Keeping Track of Your Offshore Playbook talks about Quality Audits in the context of monitoring offshore teams as presented through a case study. I think Quality Audits are an oft overlooked tool even with local teams and a place where more experienced QA folks should pay more attention too. An audit is all about gathering information, which is what we do as testers anyways. The final paragraph sums up my thoughts on audits: “… that the entire development organization now realizes the value this kind of audit can bring to the goal of continuous improvement.”
  • Geoff Koch’s Best Practices column is on how “unit testing is destined to remain by and for a modest group of undoubtedly smart specialists.” and paints a pretty damning picture. Unfortunately, it is likely an accurate one.