risk management

The Ethical Responsibility of Defect Severity ClassificationWhen dealing with defect classification, it's important to not blindly adhere to the criteria without consideration for real business or human implications. If your software does safety-critical work, do the defect levels reflect that? Or could something go live with potentially disastrous consequences?
Calculating the Cost of FailureWhat is the cost to your business of an outage due to a major bug? Usually it's calculated as mean time between failures multiplied by mean time to recovery. But what if you could deploy to a limited number of users and monitor effects? Then the equation includes a third variable: number of users impacted.
Matt Heusser
Reviewing the Keynote Presentations at STAREAST

The STAREAST testing conference in May featured more than a hundred learning opportunities. Here, we examine the four keynote presentations: Deliberate Testing in an Agile World, The Future of the Software Testing Profession, Blunders in Test Automation, and Innovation: From the Tester’s Viewpoint.

Signs Your Company May Be Growing Too Fast

You may think, “What is wrong with significant growth?” But if that growth becomes untenable, there are a host of problems: customer complaints may rise, employee dissatisfaction grows, and you can lose track of your original vision. Read on for some warning signs your business is growing too fast.

Five Principles from Chess That Can Change Your Software GameWhen you start analyzing the two strategic activities of playing chess and developing software, you will notice they share many core principles. Defining a goal, recognizing patterns, and learning from mistakes are just some of the important concepts to keep in mind with both chess and software.
You Won't Get Hacked with Help of New USB DeviceCompanies just keep getting hacked. Millions of users' data have been comprised in the last few years, so up-and-coming developer Webcloak is introducing a product that will let anyone browse the Internet “with no risk of viruses, data, or identity theft.”
Doing Our Part to Contain Point-of-Sale Data TheftIt’s easy for us as software developers and testers to dismiss intrusions on point-of-sale systems as the fault of network security professionals or inadequate network defenses. The reality is that there is a lot we should be doing as well on the software side to prevent these kinds of attacks.
Online Identify Theft Is Only Getting EasierAn expanding reliance on digital services requiring the input of personal information has increased the risk of data theft, and it only takes a few common pieces of information for the best thieves to steal your identity. More than ever, we need strong security systems to be developed.