In Finland, there is a religious annual that comes out (obviously) every year, collecting 12 monthly magazines into a bound volume. The 116th edition of Vartija was printed in 2004 with the theme, “Doctrines Challenged by the Faith of Common Man”. I guess most Finnish libraries stock it, and Finns are regular readers borrowing 3 books every 2 months. If we have faith in common man, we can presume that they also return them. Unless their great grandchildren return them a little overdue….

Posted by Antoine Picard

We have become test hoarders. Our focus on test-driven development, developer testing and other testing practices has allowed us to accumulate a large collection of tests of various types and sizes. Although this is valiant and beneficial, it is too easy to forget that each test, whether a unit test or a manual test has a cost as well. This cost should be balanced against the benefits of the test when deciding whether a test should be deleted or whether it should be written in the first place.

Let's start with the benefits of a test. It is all too easy to think that the benefits of a test are to increase coverage or to satisfy an artificial policy set by the Test Certified program. Not so. Although it is difficult to measure for an individual test, its benefits are the number of bugs that it kept from reaching production.

CITCON Denver is just around the corner, April 4th and 5th. This the 3rd annual CITCON North America event, the previous years having been in Chicago (2006) and Dallas (2007). CITCON events have also been held in London (2006), Sydney (2007) and Brussels (2007).