If anyone asks me what general systems thinking is about, I will from henceforth point them to any Jessica Hagy index card that has an X/Y chart with an -OR- in the caption.

Or I may just point everyone to it anyway. This stuff is absolutely wonderful.

http://indexed.blogspot.com/

and also

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/indexed/

The short answer is "no".

Several people have found my explanation of it useful so I'm sharing it here...

The QA metaphor in software development has come from other, arguably, more mature industries - such as medicine, manufacturing, construction and so on. It is about all the things that we do to increase the probability of building in quality - not just detecting when we've failed to build in quality as is the case with much software testing. In this regard, testing is more analogous to quality control or, QC.

In simple terms:
QC helps us answer the question 'does our product work?'
QA helps us answer the question 'does our process work?'

Unfortunately, many teams don't realise their process doesn't work until the testers find all the ways in which the product doesn't work... maybe that's why software testing has come to be known as QA.?

Pex is a project from Microsoft Research that enables *parameterized* unit testing.

Pex generates Unit Tests from hand-written Parameterized Unit Tests through Automated Exploratory Testing based on Dynamic Symbolic Execution.

http://research.microsoft.com/Pex/default.aspx

I notice from the registration page that there are only 68 early bird slots left for Agile 2008. That means the price will go up USD200 pretty soon.