If you'd live in a world where your opinions matter, would you try to make a change? Without any doubt opinions are a constant presence in our day to day lives: suggestions, reviews, these are only a few of so many different ways to influence future decisions. In this era, when the multitude of options are choking you, opinions are the ones that can help you make a quick decision under the spotlight. But lets assume that we can evaluate everything by pros and cons, would our decisions be correct? Is it actually that simple?

Software Testing World Cup is an international software testing competition, now in its second year. The competition takes place in two stages: the continental preliminaries (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania) where anyone can sign up, and the world finals which take place during the Agile Testing Days conference in Berlin. This year the preliminaries where held between April and July and the finals will take place mid-November. Irina was the first one to hear about the competition and we all ventured into the idea quickly. None of us had ever participated in a testing competition and we gladly took on the challenge as it sounded so fun and exciting, a good personal and team experience. So, on June 13, 2014 we, Irina, Ileana, Sanda and Lavinia, took part in this unusual contest, where software testing teams around Europe had to test an application for 3 hours.

After working for thirteen years as a software developer, I have dedicated the last seven years to the software products’ quality management field. During the last four years, I have also been involved in recruiting specialists. Due to my career path, I have heard various opinions related to the tester profession, giving me the feeling that this profession and its career development potential are still misunderstood. Besides, the „tester” and „QA engineer” terms are often interchanged and used improperly.

If you don’t have APIs you don’t exist. Well, to be fair, it would be more correct to say that without APIs you don’t exist in the cloud, but then again, can you exist outside the cloud nowadays? You must be thinking: nice compilation of buzzwords to start an article. Thank you! I hope the rest of the article will be equally compelling or less repulsive, depending on your taste for buzzwords.

Nowadays, one of the first questions you are asked as a Quality Assurance Engineer, is do you use Automation? Test Automation has definitely been a hot topic in recent years. Everybody is talking about it, trying to use it, complaining about it, and still it remains very much an in house business, with each company developing its private solution tailored to its own products and needs. This is only natural as products vary a lot and, especially in the game of Enterprise Software, it is hard to imagine a single Test Automation solution that can be used regardless of the actual product being developed. This being said , working in Test Automation for a couple of years in which you can see firsthand the obstacles and the rewards of automation, you eventually come to ask yourself the obvious question: How do you win the game of Test Automation?

Back towards the end of the nineties, most of the CDs that accompanied books were labeled as “multimedia” CDs: 3 images and an audio file were enough to promote that CD stuffed with 600 pages of text to a “multimedia” CD. Similarly, software companies that used to produce “applications” started to brand themselves as producing “enterprise applications”.

The present article is an introduction for those who haven’t yet worked with Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and also a source of interesting information about GWT for those who are familiar with this toolkit. In essence, GWT is a toolkit that allows creating complex web applications with minimal knowledge of HTML / JavaScript. This is possible because the GWT compiler translates Java code into HTML / JS. For example, creating a button in GWT can be done using the below code: