Hackathons, where developers meet up to do some collaborative programming, are a great venue for problem-solving and creativity. They give employees the potential to get ideas out there that could pay off big, work the bugs out of new technology, and increase morale—and, best of all, they can be held anywhere.

Using open source software is all the rage these days, and for good reason. Often teams don’t have the budget to purchase commercial tools, and without an open source solution, their productivity suffers. But open source is not a panacea. There are some challenges that can hit you hard if you aren’t careful.

Testers often look at automation work as the next career step after manual testing. Automation work has more visibility at the project level, and people who do this work usually also tend to have a little more social status. But Justin Rohrman makes a case for why testers shouldn't be the ones doing automation work.