I'm passionate about software testing, software development and cloud computing. I've joined SOASTA in 2010 and I am currently VP Business Development Europe. This is a personal blog, and the opinions expressed here are NOT those of my employer. 
Managing your workday: Quality over Quantity
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 this picture describing some best practices to manage your work day.
I’ve always liked the idea of controlling how often I check my email. Now that I’ve implemented PIFEM (read here), I find it much easier to leave email accumulate for a few hours during each days and manage the reading during time boxed period throughout the day. I’m currently down to 6, 3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. I think I can go easily down to 3 ! I write what I need to write at anytime during the day as suggested by the board.
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.
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.
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 
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 
As we’re starting a new development under NetBeans, we have evaluated quite a bit of open source and commercial tools to cover all of our test requirement. This is the first time we undergo a software development under this development platform and we wanted to make sure we pick the right tools for the job. It was a good opportunity for us to go over some of the new tools available. Here are the tools we’re going to use: