I’ve heard/seen quibbling about Exploratory Testing in various circumstances (groups, meetings) lately. My intention is to make a useful summary (I hope!) of all the ideas I found and tested. I have been listening to Pro and Con dialogues and monologues about exploratory. Following the natural track of an application, I will try to outline and underline some of the arguments.

Hi! I am Horatiu Mocian, the founder of SociaLook (www.socialook.net), a startup which tracks the activity of companies in social media (focusing on Twitter). Even if my startup is quite young, about 1-year old, the story behind it is quite interesting, and I am going to tell you all about it. The SociaLook story started in April 2011, when, after recovering from my first start-up (which failed), I started thinking about my next venture.

I will start by setting forth a dilemma concerning the selection of the interviewee for this number of the magazine: Mr. Dan Luțaș. We were colleagues during high school and college and I’d like to consider him a good friend. At first, this caused an internal conflict between the objectivity in choosing and presenting this article and the subjectivism brought about by the interference of my personal life with my professional career. At the local level, there are many experts whose achievements recommend them for the interview, without generating this conflict, so I’ll be brief in explaining why I stuck to this choice.

When I accepted the invitation to write about “How to prepare for a job interview”, I thought it would be simple. I intend this article to be easy to read and understand, and last but not least, to be an opportunity to learn something useful. When I started to write it, I realized Romanian is not an easy language and it’s even more difficult to express complex ideas in a simple way. After having finished it, I asked a 10-year old child to read it, in order to test its simplicity and fluency. He told me he didn’t understand a thing. So I started all over again.

Gogu is a funny character, cynical at times, an introvert to whom the interior monologue is an alternative to the real life. With Gogu’s help, we explore different aspects of a project manager’s life trying to find and suggest solutions easy to understand and to apply. As Gogu would say: “almost common sense”. We invite you to follow Gogu and send him your comments and suggestions.
Gogu suddenly got butterflies in his stomach. He revised the values one more time and even read the email hoping that somewhere, something was changed, that maybe he hadn’t properly understood the message.

Known under the acronym OOP, the Object Oriented Programming was introduced in the ‘60s with the language Simula67. It's the paradigm used by most of the software shops. It is supported by the mainstream programming languages like Java, C#, C++, Python, Ruby. OOP is an imperative paradigm which means that the program describes the way the system state is changed during the execution. The system is modeled through classes of objects. Each class describes the state variables of its instances, their properties and the actions that we can run on them. Through encapsulation we hide the implementation details and this way the user of the class is only interested in the interface exposed by that class. This way we can model the world around us. It seems like a very natural approach but still there are a few major problems. The problems start from the fact that, except for the constant methods, all the member functions produce side effects because they change the state of the object on which they are called or the states of other objects they have access to. Most of the object-oriented code is written this way.

Modern dynamics of software development with focus on frequent deliveries of working code makes performance an often overlooked aspect. Although approaches such as “Make it work first and refactor it later” have demonstrated advantages like easy and quick adaptation to changes of requirements, they often open the door to poorly written routines that affect performance in a negative way. Whether included in the development cycle from the very beginning, or caused by circumstances such as the discovery of very slow operation or abrupt performance degradation in certain scenarios (e.g. increasing the number of entry points such as the number of users that use a system etc.) or as a step prior to a scalability task, the measurement of application performance is a very important step in the lifetime of an application.

Researchers are often perceived as lonely individuals spending their whole lives closed in laboratories and working with complicated instruments or formulas. However a little research will prove that most famous researchers collaborated, interacted and debated with their peers and were public figures frequently. Even Albert Einstein, thought by many to simply have appeared out of the blue and completely revolutionized Physics, gathered Maurice Solovine, a Romanian student, and Conrad Habicht, a Swiss mathematician, to form Olympia Academy, an informal group that had regular meeting and discussed latest scientific discoveries, own work and even philosophy and literature two years before his “miracle year”. Innovation and discoveries come as much from dedicated solitary work, as from collaborative research and exchange of ideas and findings.

The basic concept of the compensation management is quite simple: employees perform duties for their employers and companies pay salaries according to the fulfilled objectives. Therefore, compensation is an exchange or a transaction from which both parties - employer and employee - can benefit: both sides receive something for offering another thing. However, the benefits involve much more than a simple transaction. From the employer's point of view, compensation is a matter of accessibility and motivation of the employees. The crisis period began in early 2009, when most IT companies made the transition from providing a more attractive fixed salary, to developing and establishing more appealing compensation and benefits packages, in order to attract the external resources market, but also designed to maintain current employees motivated.