The Department of Veterans Affairs wants to improve the system veterans currently use to schedule appointments in the VA's nationwide health program by moving to an open source system. To inspire more innovative solutions, the VA has launched the VA Medical Appointment Scheduling System Contest.

Kanban promotes better visibility of everyone’s progress and enables them to play catch-up. Since the test group has dependencies on other teams, such as design or development, they are the ones who might have to catch pace. Due to its inherent features, kanban helps push quality upstream.

Joe Townsend takes a look at the future of configuration management by looking back—way back—to see what others have said about CM's future and to check whether their predictions are still relevant. It's interesting to note that the problems of the past will probably still plague us in the future.