The BCW Award is made in cooperation with BlueRiverStone, our research partner in South Africa, under the direction of Mr. Ian Kruger (Managing Director). Other organizations endorsing the BCW Award process include Computer Human Interaction Society South Africa (CHI-SA) and The Ergonomics Society of South Africa (ESSA).

Results of the 2006 BCW Award are expected to be announced in October 2006.

Update: See the new Best Corporate Websites Award (2006) website for complete details.

• The 1st Workshop on Quality In Modeling is co-located with the ACM/IEEE conference that focuses on model driven engineering languages and systems The idea is that if you have a good model of the software object you're concerned with, and your quality-assure the model, then if the actual product is build 100% aligned with the model then your product will be perfect!
• The Tests And Proofs Conference, sponsored by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, resurrects the relationship between proving programs correct (a very chancy prospect) and providing tests that have the same sophistication as a proof (maybe enen more difficult). What makes this conference a landmark is that for what may be the first time the "testers" and the "provers" are talking to each other. However reluctantly; and in neutral (Swiss) territory. It's been too many years, but at least this is a start!

What ties these two events together is the correlation between model checking and some limited forms of proof of correctness. Perhaps something super will come out of this!

While that is not mean feat, no matter how well a system is organized Even so, from time to time some special needs come up that require a Power User approach, and to support that we've constructed a bag of 99 Power User Tips & Tricks. These short explanations range from explaining simple procedures for setting up SpotCheck tests, to more specific advice on how to optimize eValid for server loading support. Check it out!

• Browsers are getting improvements because "...they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the internet rather than simply displaying Web sites."
• "Major internet companies ... are devoting tremendous resources developing these Web applications -- and browser developers want them to run well."
• "Most end-user applications being developed today have at least part of their functionality running on the browser,..." (a quote in the article attributed to Christen Kroch, Opera's VP of Engineering).

We think this is a good thing, and we welcome the gathering migration to the universal application platform that browsers running Ajax appear to represent.

Remember, the eValid engine is optimized for testing and analysis of web pages, and while PDF pages do show up in the browser, PDF pages are actually interpreted by the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Because of this, they are "opaque" to eValid's ability to dig into the page. The implication is that testing of PDF pages has to proceed by a slightly different route than normally used for HTML-type pages. Here is a writeup on PDF File Recording that gives you the answers on how to do this.

Here is a reference by Max Kiesler to 50 Ajax Reference Websites From Around The World. Most are in English, but some are in other languages including German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. At the top of his list is Ajaxian, one of the best of the Ajax information sites.

Here is our new Lotus SameTime 7 Chat Record/Play Support page that outlines how this kind of thing appears to have to be done.

In addition to his own work, Don is also President of the Center for National Software Studies (CNSS). CNSS is a non-for-profit technology awareness organization that focuses on software technology issues that are critical to US government and commercial interests. CNSS recently released the 2nd National Software Summit Final Report which outlined a compelling national software strategy aimed at ensuring US security and competitiveness.

• Improved stability in playback of complex multi-object pages.
• More powerful support for AJAX-style applications that make heavy use of JavaScript and XML.
• Enhancements to the site analysis filter selections that aim to prevent user's giving contradictory instructions.
• Improvements in the site analysis scanning process to minimize failures.
• Update of the download process so that the ftp transfers now are signed.
• Refinement of the eVaild/I International Edition to improve the performance during DBCS script playbacks.

Regular eValid users are advised of changes in our periodic mailings. To check the eValid version click Help > About on the eValid browser face.

What is remarkable is that all of the discussion involved a large number of responses to posts by members of the GWT team, which has obviously been tracking all of that discussion. This is evidenced in the Google Web ToolKit Blog which announced that an updated release of GWT was made on 25 May 2006. That release fixed at least a dozen major issues. It looks like GWT is on its way!

There are now fixed-width versions for all of these values: $_Year2, $_Month2, $_Date2, $_Weekday2, $_Hour2 and $_Minute2. For complete details on how this feature works to feed current data into a playback script see the eValid on-line documentation on Reserved Variables.

Coming along with the GWT announcement is the simultaneous availability of the Official GWT Discussion Forum. In the first 24 hours of operation there were about 500 posts in over 200 topics. And, perhaps an indicator of more direct Google involvement in the technology than is normal, Bret Taylor, Google's GWT Product Manager, actually signed some of the responses to several of the more-general questions.

Where this fits into the Java technology area, the Ajax movement, the open source software movement, (most especially the Eclipse system) and how this affects Microsoft -- these are all exciting issues that remain to be explicated. For our part we're confident that the technology we have will continue to work well on heavy-Javascript applications. For the rest we will just have to wait and see.

• The 2nd International Workshop on Automated Specification and Verification of Web Systems, set for Cyprus in November 2006, aims to focus on issues surrounding web applications. In particular, the workshop seems to aim to draw attention to problems of commercial web applications, e.g. Amazon et. al.

• The AQSerM: Advances in Quality of Service Management, workshop, is supported by King's College London, and scheduled for October 2006. This workshop tries to bring together technology for Quality-of-Service (QoS) of a variety of kinds.

• The Haifa Verification Conference 2006, set for October 2006 at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel tries to focus on hardware AND software quality and verification issues. Perhaps this is the more "conventional" of the three events, but considering the sponsorship and the location this may be the most technically sophisticated.

What ties these three events together is that it seems that there is something of a resurgence of concern about software quality, and with that comes, of course, the need to communicate about what the problems are and how to address them. That's a good thing to have happen.

In Germany cooperative education has a long tradition in the vocational fields of trade, commerce and business. The Berufsakademie transferred the traditional system of vocational training to the level of tertiary education and integrated activities of the state institutions of higher education and training facilities of the employment sector in a joint effort. The Berufsakademie concept was established as a new way of practice-oriented education on university level. Especially the integration of companies as active partners into the system of higher education leads to highly qualified graduates. Therefore the Berufsakademie offers an attractive alternative to traditional universities and colleges of higher education.

Course Description The course focuses on the entire life cycle of software development -- from business modeling, requirements, analysis & design to implementation and roll-out. Along the Rational Unified Process the students become familiar with important standards and techniques for all disciplines. This includes Business Modeling, UML, but also programming concepts and test concepts. eValid is used as the test engine for web browser enabled applications. During the half year course the students realize their own project in groups from 2 to 4 people. The course is being taught by Dr. J. Pitschke.

	Toggle Absolute MouseClicks [F11]	Used when you have to record an action on an object that doesn't have internally accessible structure.
	Toggle Application Mode [F12]	Used to record from a application that is opened in a browser sub-window.
	Activate Desktop Recording [Ctrl+F12]	Used to record from any desktop application.

The complete details about these and all of the other available options can be found in the complete eValid Dashboard description.

In all eValid charts you'll see a green line (the average/mean of all values), a yellow line (25% below the average value), and a red line (25% above the average value, provided it can fit on the chart).

Most eValid charts are "live", meaning that if you hover your mouse over a part of the chart you're given an explanation of the data that's there. The new standard deviation value should make statistical analysis simpler.