Testers have a story. It involves the kind of information we gather, the way we gather it, whom we tell, and what decisions are impacted by it. Management has their own story, but sometimes the goals are different. Find out the story your executives have for testing, and see what value it brings.

Some problems we can resolve on our own in a couple of minutes. Some take more time, or we can’t resolve them alone. What do you do then? Johanna Rothman suggests scheduling a timebox to find a solution alone, then if that doesn't work, using one of the ideas in this story to "unstick" yourself.

The next wave in IT seems to be SMAC technologies—or social, mobile, analytics, and the cloud. Individually, each of the pieces of the “SMAC stack” are not new to us. However, what is changing now is the use of these four elements together as an integrated ecosystem, rather than as separate silos.