Even with the best tools and processes in the world, if your staff is not focused and productive, your testing efforts will be weak and ineffective and your finished product will reflect this. Retired Marine Colonel, long-time test consultant Rick Craig describes how using the Marine Corps Principles of Leadership will help you become a better leader and, as a result, a better test manager or tester. Learn the differences between leadership and management and how they can complement each other. Discover new approaches to energize your testers and learn to avoid some that won't. Rick explores motivation, morale, training, span of control, immersion time, and how to promote a consistent testing discipline within your organization. He addresses the role of "influence leaders" and how to use them as powerful agents of change.

In a counterpoint to his previous Technically Speaking column, Lee explains why holding fast to one's beliefs is not necessarily a bad thing.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) serve important roles on a project and are especially pivotal during the testing phase. In this week's column, Dion Johnson explores how SMEs positively and negatively affect testing and what you can do to make sure you have the right amount of SMEs on your testing team.

This short book, written by Clarke Ching, is a "biztech" parable for software developers who want to survive—and then thrive—through a credit crunch. We have republished the book in a four-part series. In part two, Bob, Bill, and Sam discover how a rocky economy can flip project costs and return on investments and how much money could be lost by canning the FBU project. Can they use these projections to save the project and their jobs?