A local television station provides a Web service that allows schools and businesses in the area to easily enter information on closures due to bad weather. The information then is displayed as a crawl along the bottom of the television screen. Some kids hack into the site and declare their school closed for the day, and it's immediately shown on everyone's television! It's a cute story. Now let's imagine that these same kids hack the prices on your eCommerce site or obtain access to sensitive customer records on your company Web site. This time the story is not so laughable. Mike Andrews shares his favorite top ten holes in Web site security including "SQL injection" and "cross-site scripting," shows examples of each, and discusses the effects these security breaches can have on your site. Fortunately, the number of attacks is rather small and easy to repair-if you know where to look.

We all know how important test progress (or lack of) is to the success of the project. But why is it that sometimes no one takes notice? Valuable test reports provide information that is needed, not just easy to gather. Test progress reports aid management in decision-making and risk assessment and help testing teams set priorities. In this presentation, Isabel Evans asks, "Do our reports add value for their audience or are we just supplying 'chart junk' that will not be read? Are we providing teams and managers with information they need or giving them what we have? Do our reports and charts emphasize or hide our message? Are our reports clear and to the point?" She discusses what types of information different audiences need and when; how to display information using charts, diagrams, and text to be effective; and how to predict future progress from past reports.

Beta testing is an industry standard practice to obtain user feedback prior to general availability of software. Have you ever considered that the Beta release can be used to validate the software's value to customers and application users? Extending the Beta concept will result in higher customer satisfaction (and higher revenue for commercial products). Also, you can employ Beta testing to evaluate not only the software product, but the distribution (and sales) process, training, customer support, and usage within your customers' environments. Far beyond just finding defects in the product, you can focus Beta testing on how well the software is meeting your customers' needs. What does that mean to the Development team and the organization as a whole? What are the risks and challenges that we face? What are the rewards?

A revolution in the business of software is coming . . . The boundaries between the business and IT from one enterprise to another will disappear. The space around functional system silos will dissolve. How we develop and deploy software will have to undergo radical change, challenging our entire thought process about how, why, and for whom we build it. Already today, delivery cycle times are down to days and business processes embedded in software represent invaluable corporate intellectual property. Soon, service-oriented architectures will enable ad hoc application integration and sophisticated, dynamic user-driven software configurations. Web services, already deployed on many corporate Intranets, will be exposed to customers (and competitors as well as malicious hackers). These forces represent profound changes in how software is developed and deployed.