What would bring foreigners to Siberia?

In 2008 Novosibirsk was crowded with tourists from all over the world due to total solar eclipse. But could you believe that the US celebrities, whose names (or their companies names) are known all over the world could come here in winter when even locals suffer from frosts?

Staff is one of the most important assets in any company. To a large extent, business success is determined by personalities of employees, from top managers up to bottom line operators. That is why HR-managers and recruiting agencies face daily a challenging task of finding a proper person for every open vacancy they have.

In recruiting process there are a lot of important factors, such as professionalism and communication skills of HR-managers, their ability to analyze candidates' personalities, to interpret test results correctly, etc. Not the least of the factors is a system of candidates' information storage.

Most of our customers say that this year's winter is coldest one for at least last decade

Over 2 years already passed since we started to use Scrum processes at software development here, at Fortess. I guess, it is already enough to make judgments on its effectiveness.

How it started to us: we had quite a difficult fixed price project, with significant project scope (involving about 20 developers from Java and C++ departments) and tight schedule. The project has already started, and we faced a lot of communication and interaction gaps. To minimize these problems, we decided to take a risk and to try Scrum, inspired by "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" book.

Thank our customers, partners and employees for being with us at 2009. We appreciate our cooperation and looking forward for fruitful 2010. 

We are wishing everybody a joyful year and bright memories.

Short video with memorable moments of the last year at Fortess is available here:

Recently in Novosibirsk there was a seminar, I really found thoughtful. The seminar was devoted to different choices in IT career in Russia. Leading specialists in IT sectors shared their visions on types of IT companies in Russia, and the most important personal characteristics, all IT companies are looking for in future employees.

Celebrating Halloween with traditional Halloween Jack o'Lantern and costumes is one of our favorite corporate events.

On October 13 we participated in a conference "RFID practics in Value Chain" at GS1, Cologne.

I haven't found a tester yet who didn't, at least unconsciously,
perform exploratory testing at one time or another.
James Bach

At the beginning of my career in testing many times I faced a challenge in a form of a need to conduct testing without pre-defined test design and enough product documentation, and to do it ASAP. What my astonishment was when one day I found out that there is a well-known approach in software testing society named Exploratory Testing (ET).

Another presales conversation about independent quality control ended up with a prospect's concern about IPR on their product. I hope that my thoughts on this issue might be useful for others.