Auditors' work implies a lot of responsibility so they need to be careful and thorough. Auditors, especially SOX auditors, can charge your company anywhere from $150 to $500 per hour; they are expensive in Euros too.

So, the goal is to make the auditor happy with all information he needs and get him/her out of your office as quickly as possible.

There is a theory which is called the butterfly effect. It states that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing can cause a hurricane in the US. This is also called the chaos theory and it describes the relation of cause and effect in complex systems like the weather.

Creating another version of your application can result in the replication of the bugs that exist in your original version. We call this the "Zombie Bug Pattern".

Many of you develop for multiple platforms. This often means that some code runs on a database on your IBM i and other code runs on another platform such as a Linux application server or a Windows desktop.

Our opportunity to save some serious money is at the point of time when we really start believing that this is true. Of course, we know that it’s true, but in the end there is never time to do it right but always time to do it over. There is a reason why most companies don’t feel this pain as much as they should. At Remain Software we like to call this the “post-bug cost calculation”. There is not even a well-known expression for it because we never calculate how much a bug has actually cost us (did you ever do it?)

What we do in an automated process in each of the change states is typically managed by electronic documents. For example, if a user reports a bug this is logged as a problem. Based on this problem the process will issue a change request. If we are advanced we will flag this in the problem document and we will log the details such as the date and time when the change request was raised.

Application Lifecycle Management can be a very complex field. Given the diversity of today’s international laws and regulations, finding an optimal process is very challenging. I was taught to break down complex matters to a level where they are no longer complex. After this has been done, it is much easier to go back and grasp the complexity of the whole.

Who has not enjoyed wasting time searching for Waldo. Searching for Waldo is fun, you look around a picture and you observe the picture in a very detailed way and discover things that you would never have seen otherwise. However, looking for stuff is not alway's fun. "Au Contraire" as the French would say. Looking for stuff is the biggest time waster in the universe. It is the energy that feeds frustration and can drive a man to madness.