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.