What’s Most Misunderstood about Quality Assurance in Custom Software?

When most people think of Quality Assurance—or QA to the initiated—they think of a room full of obnoxious overgrown teenagers pounding on their keyboards trying to make software malfunction. Anyone with IT experience in web application development knows there’s more to it than that, but many custom software projects run into problems because the relationship between the development team and the QA team is allowed to become too antagonistic. The developers work to make the users’ lives easier, then the QA people try to find flaws in their work. While many software vendors take a reductive approach to QA, treating it as nothing more than a search for bugs, the best approach to custom projects is to integrate QA processes into the development process from the beginning. In other words, as soon as you’re done answering the question “How should it work?” you should be going on to answer “How will we know it’s working that way?”

How IT Departments Can Make BYOD Safer: Five Top Tips

Bring your own device (BYOD) is nothing new – employees have been using their personal IT in the workplace, or at home for work purposes, since the last millennium.

Nor is it something most IT departments can prevent – even if personal devices are barred from the corporate network, there’s not much IT can do about the use of personal devices, personal mobile apps or software, and personal cloud services, while employees are working.

Vietnam’s IT Outsourcing Industry Shows Big Potential

Vietnam’s IT Outsourcing Industry Shows Big Potential

Vietnam plays a small role in global IT services today, but it has big potential to contribute more in coming years. Many Vietnamese IT companies including S3 Corp. and policymakers want to develop the human capital necessary for future success. They face challenges that will require clever solutions.

To Open Source or Not to Open Source

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn’s engineering blog.

I have often been asked by colleagues about some advice with respect to open source.  In general mostly about how we are thinking about it and our approach to it.  Here is a “short” post that attempts to share some of our learnings.

Wearable technology poised to surge: things all CEOs & CIOs must know

Even when our fixture with smartphones as the ‘all-controlling’ hub continues to gather steam, there is yet another revolution ready to shake things up. Wearable devices, tagged for long as the “next big thing” has truly arrived and in a big way.

Viet Nam Ranks First In Global Outsourcing Destination

Vietnam has taken top spot in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Shared Service Location Index of Cushman & Wakefield.

Vietnam ranks first in the company’s Where in the World? Business Process Outsourcing and Shared Service Location Index, followed by the Philippines, Bulgaria, Romania, Peru and Malaysia. Vietnam was fifth last year.

Stopping Data Breaches: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

The 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, released last month by Verizon, estimated that there were 2,122 confirmed data breaches in 2014, generating $400 million in losses. This week we learned that one attack that was not included in this count happened in June 2014, targeting CareFirst BlueCross Blue Shield, serving 3.4 million customers in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. CareFirst only recently discovered the breach—names, birthdates, and email addresses of 1.1. million members—after putting in place new security measures.

4 Things You Should Know About Platforms

Steve Jobs didn’t want to build an app store.  As Walter Isaacson describes in his biography of Apple’s founder, the famously controlling Jobs was wary of the “bandwidth” needed to police a veritable army of third party developers.  At first, he wouldn’t even discuss it.

Yet eventually, even Jobs had to relent and the App store has become an enormous success.  Last year, developers reaped $15 billion on the platform.  In fact, third party apps have become so central to the iPhone, it’s hard to imagine it without them.  Increasingly, products are becoming platforms.

It’s become kind of a Joy’s Law for the networked era—the best resources and capabilities always lie somewhere else.  So unless you can pull in people outside your company to improve your product, you’re going to be at a distinct disadvantage.  Yet for all the talk about platforms, there’s little guidance about what makes them tick. Here’s what you need to know.

How Facebook Designs for a Billion People

 

Margaret Gould Stewart is the director of product design at Facebook. Having worked previously at Google and YouTube, she knows a thing or two about designing at scale. In her TED talk, “How giant websites design for you (and a billion others, too),” she shared some lessons she’s learned along the way, three of which could be easily applied to any business.

IT Security: The New Target For CEO Performance

As Gregg Steinhafel steps down as chairman and CEO of Target, we’re witnessing more than just an act of contrition for one of the largest and most costly data breaches — ever. We’re witnessing the evolution of data breaches, and IT security in general, as a corner office concern.

For today’s CEO, being the victim of criminal hackers is no longer just a source of embarrassment. Now, being hacked often carries legal ramifications and can even cost you your job. Here are a few tips for those of you who’d like to stay in the corner office.