When I experienced a technical problem and sent an email message to the online support address, I received an immediate automated acknowledgement giving me a ticket number and advising me that I’d be contacted within 48 hours with a response to my problem.

There has been a lot of recent discussion on Twitter about the use of mocking frameworks and writing readable tests. Here is a roundup of some of the recent blogs on the subject.

This week, Bill Gates joined Twitter. (In a matter of hours, he had over 100,000 followers.)

Roughly 200 miles above the earth, someone else also was sending a first message to Twitter. NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer posted "Hello Twitterverse!" (surely the 2010 equivalent of "Hello world!") directly to the social networking site from aboard the International Space Station. According to a CNET article, previous astrotweets had to be emailed to ground control, which then posted them.

During a break at a conference, a woman named Marge told me about an experience she recently had at another conference. It seems that she'd been talking to the keynote speaker when he abruptly turned away and started talking to someone else.....

In “Growing Object Oriented Software Guided By Tests”, Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce talk about the dangers of tests that occasionally fail, otherwise known as flickering tests. These failures can cause teams to start seeing these failures as false positives, and distrust their build results.

There has been a lot of discussion about this topic recently.

At the Agile 2009 Conference, the LiveAid lab created an iPhone application to enable people to donate to the Mano a Mano charitable organization. This lab was an opportunity for participants to learn something new, practice their craft, donate their time to a worthy cause, and meet other folks. By the end of the conference, the application was working and had collected over $10,000 in donations.

Volunteering offers an opportunity to practice our craft and give something back to the community.

When your department runs into snag in working with other departments, how do you resolve the situation? Getting together to talk can help not only to rectify the current problem, but also to minimize future problems. Consider, for example....

Happy New Year! Welcome to 2010. No flying cars yet, but it still feels like the future.

And Skype is hoping to help make our future a little clearer.

When I was a kid, there was a little exhibit tucked away in one of the theme parks in Orlando, FL--either Walt Disney World or Universal Studios, though the nostalgia part of my brain has long since turned all of that into an indecipherable mash of childhood joy--displaying a single, futuristic device that, at the time, seemed as amazing to me as a personal jet pack. It looked like an ordinary office telephone--lots of buttons, a little on the bulky side--but it had a single distinguishing feature that made it better than any other phone I'd ever seen: a video screen.

We spend our time at work reflecting on our team's progress. Yet it’s easy to forget to follow these same self-evaluation processes for our own professional development.