Fascinating research conducted by Dr Blah at the University of Whatever uses agent-based models to show that promoting individuals at random, instead of promoting the most competent individuals in their current positions, tends to lead to better performance overall.

They also compared the strategy of alter

I've been experimenting with techniques to help us assess how effectively we apply good habits, and one technique in particular seems to be bearing early and very promising fruit.

Inspired by the example being set by Antony Marcano and Andy Palmer's pairwith.us project, I've been using screen captures to assess how well developers - myself included - apply basic Test-driven Development practices on short coding exercises.

I am in the middle of a Performance and Load tools selection process and wanted to get some feedback here.

I currently work in a shop that uses a mix of proprietary and open source tools for web performance & load testing. The bulk of our workload and analysis is currently done using SilkPerformer. As you all probably know, there is a class of tools that is *very* expensive (including SilkPerformer). Installations and maintenance can run into 7 figures ($$$) with yearly maintenance contracts upwards of 6 figures. Since SilkPerformer is in place and we are happy with it (besides price/maintenance), there is no point in moving to a similarly priced tool. Therefore I have ruled out the class of "high end" tools from my selection:

(small code dump...)

OpenSTA (Open Systems Testing Architecture) is a popular open source web performance test tool. It uses a scripting language named SCL (Script Control Language), which seems to be heavily influenced by Fortran. It's a little bit dated and clumsy to program with, but suffices for writing scripts modeling complex web transactions.