Our society is founded on the importance of meetings, and it seems that the higher on the corporate ladder one climbs, the more meetings he must attend. Indeed, one of Michele Sliger's coworkers calculated that the amount of time she spends arranging meetings, getting to meetings, and in meetings equates to almost her entire workweek-thirty-six hours on average. Even though we may lose track of time in meetings, we all are painfully aware of the time we spend waiting for everyone to show up. In this column, Michele Sliger explains some of the tactics she's seen teams use to ensure that meetings start on time.

A self-professed latecomer to IT, Danny Faught has a new appreciation for the challenges faced when developing products for an internal customer rather than products for sale.

Efficiency and effectiveness are the cornerstones of successful quality assurance and test automation effort. Jeff Beange describes how RBC Financial Group successfully implemented a quality assurance and automation outsourcing engagement, using a blended onshore/offshore approach. He describes the details of the engagement model and outlines the risks they encountered. Jeff describes their mitigation strategy, governance structure, and the metrics used to evaluate their implementation. Learn a communication strategy and automation framework you can use to implement automation using an outsourcing partnership. Find out what setup is required before any outsourcing model can be successful: detailed requirements, a complete set of test data, and a test lab that is accessible to all. Jeff describes the common pitfalls of offshore engagements and the three categories of outsourcing problems-people, process, and governance.

What can today's software testers learn from present and past testing masters, many of whom have put their own lives on the line to make amazing contributions to the world in which we live? Clive Bates is thinking about testers such as Chuck Yeager, Yuri Gagarin, Andy Green, Leonardo da Vinci, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Isambard who? Isambard Kingdom Brunel was one of the greatest engineers in British history. A designer of bridges, tunnels, viaducts, docks, and ships, Brunel constantly battled resistance from established authorities, lack of adequate funding, changes in requirements, and project delays (sound familiar?). In researching the achievements of past testing masters, Clive has identified important traits and characteristics that made them successful. If we acknowledge and adopt these traits in our lives, we may become more successful in our work.

• The testing secrets of masters in other disciplines