My 'Technically Speaking' column article "Lessons Learned in Close Quarters Combat" has been publushed in the December 2008 issue of Better Software Magazine. The summary reads as follows:

Few would think that Special Forces tactics bear any relation to software project teams. But Antony Marcano draws a surprising parallel between the dynamics of modern Special Forces “room-clearing” methods and the dynamics of modern software development teams.

It begins as follows...

I just released a new version of QuickGraph. Among many small improvements here and there, the big news are:

• .net 2.0 support is back! QuickGraph now builds both for .net 2.0 and .net 3.5 (with extension methods).
• The Dijkstra algorithm use a Fibonacci Heap under the hood, which is way more efficient. Courtesy of Roy Williams!
• better serialization support and other bug fixes.

Enjoy, Peli.

In response to this posting, Clive asks, "So in your opinion what should a test plan contain?"

First, Clive, thank you for asking.

Let's consider first what we might mean by "plan". The way James Bach and I talk about planning (and the way we teach it the Rapid Software Testing course) is that a plan is the sum or intersection of strategy and logistics. Strategy is the set of ideas that guide your test design. Logistics is the set of ideas that guide your application of resources. Put those things together, and you have a plan. The most important thing to note about this is that a plan is not a physical thing; it's a set of ideas. Thus, it's important to keep clear the difference between the plan and the planning documents—that is, the documents that contain some information about the plan.

In January, Charley Baker, Pete Dignan and I will be hosting the eighth Austin Workshop on Test Automation. We’ve explored some aspects of Watir at past workshops, but this will be the first dedicated to it. Specifically, we seek to...