George Dinwiddie told me a wonderful story at the AYE Conference last night. He was working with a group of developers at a company with several development groups. He coached them in implementing test-driven development and unit testing, and he emphasized to the programmers the importance of delivering well-tested code to the system testers. The results were impressive. The testers found dramatically fewer problems than usual—only one bug that was classified as high severity by the project owners, and other than that the product was given a clean bill of health.

It's holiday season again.

Not yours. Just me.

This year I'm in Cyprus in a lovely and extremely English resort called Coral Bay. I've rented a villa about 100 metres from the beach and about half a mile from the main strip where they keep all the really touristy stuff and less law-abiding folk can buy very dodgy DVDs of films that are still in the cinemas back home (and, in some cases, haven't even been made yet).

I think that the question is wrong itself. The question is what a novice „should”. I do believe that for most of the novices this is not the best way to learn testing art/skills, but it depends on a person. However! To learn testing by following scripts (I mean detailed instructions for manual testing) written by others is even worse, much worse!

I'm delighted to announce that my first contribution to a book debuted today.

The book is called The Gift of Time. It's a collection of essays honouring the life and work of Jerry Weinberg on the occasion of his 75th birthday and his 50th year in the computing business. The book was edited by Fiona Charles, and features contributions by many of Jerry's colleagues and students: Robert L. Glass, James Bach, Sherry Heinze, Sue Petersen, Esther Derby, Willem van den Ende, Judah Mogilensky, Naomi Karten, James Bullock, Tim Lister, Johanna Rothman, Jonathan Kohl, Bent Adsersen, Jerry's wife Dani Weinberg... and me. That's a rare list, and I'm honoured to be among the people on it.

This was my first time using an electronic voting machine. Did anyone else have to fight the urge to test the software instead of just voting?