We don't exactly have Scott Adams on staff to draw witty satires about office shinanigans, but we always enjoy putting out a few good software comics at the end of a grueling week. Whether it's about the downside of a classic buzzword (Agile anyone?) or the never-ending battle between the QA and development team, it's good to post something a little more light hearted every once in a while.

While server virtualization has actually been available for more than a decade, many IT professionals still refer to it as a relatively new technology. The comfort and familiarity of a world made up of only physical servers caused many to resist even looking into the virtual platform, but changes in the overall technology landscape are forcing some to re-think implementing this technology, especially because of its enhanced performance.

This is exactly what many developers are left thinking when their dependent application is stripped away from the proverbial teat that of which their survival rested upon. You may ask, “Why? Why would a company do such thing to their loyal, er, developers?” You may feel like Scarlett O'Hara during the closing scene of “Gone with the Wind,” but truth-be-told, you're not really being abandoned.

A bunch of us at SmartBear recently returned from StarEast, the biggest software testing conference this side of the Mississippi. I loved it! Mainly because it was so heartening to see all the people committed to high-quality software, unselfconscious in their geekiness, proud of their craft, knowing they play a crucial if small role in the stability of our world and its future.

We have seen it more often than not lately, and many of us have been taking it for granted: Twitter as the place to go for rapid communication during an emergency. Here in the Boston area, we saw the whole East Coast rely on Twitter as a communications vehicle during Hurricane Sandy.

One reason Obama won the 2012 presidential election was his staff’s use of open source. Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, tells all.

When the Chicago Board Options Exchange trading system was knocked out a few weeks ago, investors and customers wanted answers, and they wanted them fast. The CBOE answered, but the outage wasn’t a hack as many had guessed – it was a software defect that, by all accounts, the development team was fully aware of before the release.

I’ve touched on this subject in the past, but this time I want to dive right into a response to the following quote from a recently released study on Agile testing:

Thousands of miles might separate us from Mom, and often we forget to pick up the phone and dial her number. But yet, whenever the month of May sets in and Mother’s Day approaches, we remember that special someone who brought us into this life, or who is mother to our children. Maybe we pick out some flowers or perhaps a gift to send to her to show our love and appreciation.

It has become more and more common for software quality processes to span the entire lifecycle, from development through production monitoring. The job of building and maintaining quality software cannot end at user acceptance or the hand off to operations. It has to extend to reliability, availability, and performance in operations.