Agile testing is, among other things, about testing early, testing often, and testing smart. How do you achieve that? A combination of actions that can take place in parallel can help you get there. You can start by increasing your QA staff's skills through training (formal or peer-based) so that they are able to not only execute automated tests but also enhance the existing test-code base and create new ones.

Efectuar pruebas de forma agile tiene que ver, entre otras cosas, con probar tempranamente, muchas veces, y astutamente. ¿Como puede lograr eso? Llevando a cabo una serie de acciones en paralelo. Puede comenzar con incrementar el nivel de conocimientos del personal de QA mediante entrenamiento (el cual puede ser formal o mediante compañeros de trabajo) con el fin de que no tan solo puedan ejecutar pruebas automatizadas sino también mejorar el código de pruebas existentes, e inclusive codificar nuevas pruebas.

In one of my recent Trends Advisors ("One Small "Oops" for Amazon, One Giant "Holy #$@%" for Mankind," 23 July 2009), I discussed the unpleasantness between Amazon and its customers who found one morning that their (now illegal) copy of George Orwell's 1984 had been somehow removed from their Kindle electronic rea

"The worst may be behind us."

So said US President Obama in August, ever the optimist. He was not alone, however. Joining him was a rather large chorus of investors who over the past few months cheered some of the economic data, driving the stock market up.

In ancient times, the Oracle (the person, not the database) was someone to whom you addressed important questions. The answers that the Oracle gave were always true, but were often given in an elaborate code. I imagined recently that I took some of my clients' questions to a modern version of the Oracle for enlightenment.

We read much these days about business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) converging. Is that just hype, or does it really make sense? And if it does make sense, just what might that mean for our organization -- not just in terms of technology, but also in terms of that subtler, softer kind of thing we call "culture" -- the unwritten rules of the game?

Search is having a major influence on BI and data retrieval and analysis in general. Although the technology is still developing, the combination of BI and search is important because it can provide nontechnical business users and BI consumers with easier access to -- and the ability to analyze -- both structured and unstructured information.

Cutter is paying attention to IT governance in 2009. The September Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) reports the results of the recent Cutter IT Governance Survey. The December Cutter IT Journal, which we're editing, is about IT governance. Recent CIO surveys done by others place IT governance in the top echelon of concerns.

Why all this attention? Simply, because effective IT governance creates IT value.

In his groundbreaking book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore develops his interpretation of the technology adoption cycle of Everett Rogers. This cycle starts with the innovators, moving on to the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and finally, the laggards.

The shift from local to distributed, from physical to truly digital, is inevitable. Maintaining digital infrastructures, however commoditized, is not core to any of the beneficiaries of the Web, just as running one's own power plant makes no sense. Preteens, adolescents, and young adults don't even think about these things.

There was an interesting and well-written column in the New York Times editorial section a few weeks ago called "Sleepwalking Through September," by Doug Glanville (20 August 2009).

The product team is a cross-functional group of managers and/or individual contributors who are collectively responsible for managing the product's lifecycle. The size of the product team will vary depending on the role of the product manager, as described previously in this series.

In my last Advisor, "SOA and the Cloud: Getting Past the Hype" (19 August 2009), I introduced the main categories of cloud computing. This week, I'll cover some of the product innovations taking place in those categories.

Judging from the wildly enthusiastic international crowd of 1,400 attending the Agile2009 conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA, last week, XP, Scrum, and agile software development methodologies are becoming more mainstream. After years of pilot projects, agile is finally gaining acceptance as a legitimate approach to software development in the business community.

Outsourcing represents another way of managing the costs of an activity. Whether we outsource the mowing of our lawn to avoid the cost of owning and operating a lawn mower, or if we outsource the costs of developing an IT service, the result ends up in a net savings of direct and indirect costs.

Data integration vendor Informatica Corporation announced it is buying complex event processing (CEP) software vendor Agent Logic. Financial terms of the deal were not revealed. Still, this development is significant because it will combine the capabilities of Informatica's data integration tools with Agent Logic's rules-based CEP platform.

Different people understand cloud computing in different ways. Some see it as a communications enabler. Some see it as the source of open source and proprietary applications. Some see it as a path to technology independence. Others see it as extreme outsourcing. So what is it? My working definition comes from our colleagues at Wikipedia, who tell us that cloud computing:

I'm not sure that I agree with the notion that innovation (creativity) is going to collapse in these hard times just because of a lack of money (see "Code Blue for IT Innovation," Cutter Business Technology Trends Council Opinion, Vol. 9, No. 12).

A couple of recent client engagements, with very large companies, reminded me about the fixation on process in many companies. Having used agile, iterative methods for so many years, I lost track of how pervasive process orientation can be in some organizations.

There was a time in the early 1990s when a good laptop computer cost upwards of US $4,000. This was for a computer with a 10-inch screen, four or eight MB of memory, and a 100-MB disk. Communications for this computer were limited to a slow-speed, dial-up line.

Cutter is paying attention to IT governance in 2009. The September Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) reports the results of the recent Cutter IT Governance Survey. The December Cutter IT Journal, which we're editing, is about IT governance. Recent CIO surveys done by others place IT governance in the top echelon of concerns.

As I pointed out in last week's Advisor (see "Complex Event Processing," 26 August 2009), complex event processing (CEP) remains an emerging technology that holds the promise of enabling companies to increase operational efficiency by providing a means to identify and interpret the effect of seemingly unrelated events

It cannot be said any clearer: we have significantly underestimated the impact that the Web is having -- and will continue to have -- on our personal and professional lives.

I've been talking with friends and colleagues over the last few days about which current IT technologies and concepts will still be in vogue two years from now. Of course, "Web 2.0" immediately came up.

The recent announcement by BI vendor MicroStrategy, Inc., that its BI toolset (MicroStrategy 9) has been certified to run on the VMware virtualization platform has me thinking more about the possible benefits and issues of operating BI systems in virtualization environments.