It looks like cloud computing is going to be very hot in 2009. After Amazon, Microsoft and Google, IBM is planning to make its push in the cloud computing space. This is definitely a good news for everyone looking to use these type of service. As mentioned in one of my previous post, this is something I’m looking into in 2009 to add flexibility to my organization’s test infrastructure. This healthy competition is definitely going to bring better service and drive cost down !
Excerpt from the Reuters article
BOSTON, April …

I’ve just ran across this short article on the Personal MBA blog which summarizes really well how I approach both my professional life and personal life. Project yourself into a situation where you’d do something (useful) and which would bring you excitement. It doesn’t matter how far you are from that situation as long as you understand clearly your goal. Then you can drill down and lay down intermediate stages which will help you reach the ultimate goal. These intermediate levels should really get you closer to where you want …

As a QA director, I focus particularly on the quality of our products of course but it is also true on how I try to manage both my professional and personal life. I’m not particularly interested to do a lot at an average level but rather do maybe less but at an exceptional level. Optimally I’d like to do a lot at an exceptional level but if you want to reach an optimal  work-life balance, you will need to compromise.
I ran across this article on lifehacker and got interested by …

I regularly read a number of online magazines. As our products have a big performance requirement, I’m particularly close to performance testing and I try to keep up to date with new techniques and tools. Software Test & Performance magazine fit perfectly in the performance area as well as in more general testing topics. This month issue covers interesting articles about security and how to make the best decision when deciding to make a release available with known bugs.
The April issue can be downloaded here

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This is the first post of a series I’m planning to write about Software Testers motivation and how to best manage it. I’m a strong believer that people are everything and that they should be your priority #1. I might state the obvious but my various professional experiences in various organizations told me that people were not necessarily the upmost priority to some.
One of the many tools I have in my management toolbox is the regular use of software test conferences. I find various benefits to have some Software testers …

As part of my professional growth and training, I spend quite a bit of free time reading books on various subjects. These days I’m particularly attracted by the business shelf. I get technical growth directly on web article and conference (online and live test conference. More on this in a future post) but nothing replace (other than experience) a good book in the business area. I’m part of the personal MBA community which offers an interesting concept. I can’t say that I’m a very active …

As all my testing teams are geographically distributed, I am obviously always trying to maximize the effectiveness of our test hardware infrastructure while looking very closely at costs (especially in this tough economic environment). I’m particularly trying to reach optimum flexibility and scalability for our environment. All the products I’m responsible for are developed and tested at different pace. They also might be at different maturity level requiring different test focus (I’m particularly thinking about performance and benchmarks).

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always had trouble managing properly the huge amount of email I receive everyday. I’ve tried creating dedicated folders with email to be processed, tried the flag functionality of outlook, colors, priority settings etc. I’ve always managed to be reasonably organized but there was always a part of me which was afraid to miss important email to process. Then I’ve ran across an article from Ian Palangio’s who runs a blog on productivity. He describes his own system to manage email called PIFEM which …