I made another try for a puzzle.
For this one you have to select the right operators to obtain the correct results on horizontal and vertical.
Review it and if you have other ideas please go ahead and suggest.

This puzzle is included in this post but you can access direct link here
http://www.testalways.com/cgi-bin/diamond/diamond.html

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My opinion is that usually the bigger the company, the worst and more uncomfortable is for the employee. This applies very well for testers. This is more a feeling than actual facts but now I have also some ideas in metrics. I am not very sure of it but I think it has some relevance.
For a big company you need layers or levels to maintain control. Often the value drops at any level, not necessarily because the people of a lower level are less skilled, but because of internal procedures limitation. So for example let’s say that the lower level represents 80% of the immediate upper level. I refer here at the efficiency and possible profit, not at quantity. Multiplying the human resource will multiply the costs also. 0.8*0.8*0.8=0.512 so a level is almost 50% of the value from 3 levels upper.
Flattening the levels or using multiple audit level is not very useful because it doesn’t really help too much. You need some structure when working with huge number of people.
There are also some benefits to this structure like keeping competition up, replacing people quickly when they ask for more money…But there are also downsizes for it.

The phrase “Test automation makes things to be faster”, or similar ones, is spoken sometimes too fast, and without knowing real behavior of a software. Everywhere are ads with “automation”, and to be honest I think most job ads are copied from other job ads, because it looks cool I suppose. You can have an infinite possibilities of failure for a software. The ones that are “automated” are actually representing the simplest situations.
Another situation is no automation requirements where things go like this: opportunistic people taking the positions, blocking the well-intended people to evolve there and improve the process. This increases bad reputation for testing and in cases of large companies, they then move their offices in cheaper locations. If the stuff repeats there, they don’t loose too much money at least as before.
Another problem I see in testing is that is placed too much in the computer science area and its actually not very much the case.

I fouled around with wix.com which looks pretty interesting to create a demo page

Try the direct link here: http://www.wix.com/testalways123/context

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Logs are an important part in testing. A lot of time will show you problems you missed.  The idea is not to resume only at default logs. Ask the dev to create a log output functionality if the software doesn’t have one.

In Linux is usually easier to follow up logs, “tail -f” usually does a good job. Its harder when you have multiple files with logs and you need them in the same time.

In logs (especially debug mode) you can see also another level of the application. And usually is very useful. It gives you a different perspective on the product.