I’ve started my career as a typical Software Engineer, messing up with C++ and Java code on B2B software (good time !). During that same time, I had the opportunity to see Lou Gerstner on stage as he was visiting our IBM campus. It was right in the middle of the e-Business period and Lou was here to explain us what e-Business was about and what it meant for us. It was one hour which changed my life. I was so impressed by the message, the clarity, the energy, the …

Almost a year ago (wow, times really fly !) I’ve shared with you an email management system I was starting to use. During this year, I’ve shared this system with as many people as possible as I think it is really excellent. I don’t see myself today not using it as it did help me being 10 times more efficient when dealing with the pile of email I receive everyday. Some close colleague were as excited as I was and made a few improvement. In this quick post, I wanted …

Damn ! I just realized that my latest article is almost 1 month old ! This is unacceptable for my trusted readers and as I spend a night in London I decided to share one of my latest read. I did read during the past months but for once, I indulged myself with some great science-fiction books I had in my stack: The forever war from Joe Hadelman (always trust a classic. This is an awesome read !), the Ophiuchi Hotline from John Varley and The Currents of Space from …

The European Commission has started to listen to Oracle argument for its planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems. All eyes will be on Sun’s MySQL business unit as the talk held last month ended up in an impasse as the EC is concerned that the acquisition will seriously reduce competition in the hot databases market. Oracle will be helped by customers such as Vodafone, The UK National Health Service, BBV etc. Against this merger, you can find Microsoft and SAP.

“Oh, and by the way we’re launching our own programming language …” This is the latest news coming from Google today after a tornado of announcement last week: Acquisition of Admob and Gizmo5, new personal dashboards, free WiFi in US airport during holidays (Hey, Yahoo gives free Wifi too !), lower price of online storage etc. It looks like Go comes from an 20% time project R&D project and is becoming today a project opened to a broad community with formal support from Google. Here are its major attributes:

Compiled …

If you follow this blog, you know that I‘ve been scratching my head to find relevant metrics to assess the quality of our various products under development. I’m involved in a very large program which is highly visible. These metrics are not only important to our development organization but also to executives who are investing in the program. I wanted to come up with a simple model, relevant for all important characteristics of a software and requiring low effort to compute. Having a model following international standard was of course …

Along with blogs, Webinars/conferences, Twitter has become very quickly part of my technical-watch toolbox. It took me a bit of time at first to clearly understand how I could take advantage of Twitter (like most people I would say) but I’m glad I dig a bit more as I find it very useful today. Assuming you’ve got the right tool (I use Seesmic but switch regularly on Tweetdeck) and the right focus in the people you follow, it not only brings a large amount of good knowledge but also allow …

I’m a big fan of dzone which is more than a great digg-like for the developers community. It’s another great tool to be used as part of your technical-watch toolbox whether you’re a developer or a tester.
They also offer a number of very useful cheat sheets on various technical subjects. It’s well-written, filled with useful tips and source code examples and best of all it’s free ! I’ve tried to compile those which I think could be useful for a software testers operating in an agile environment.