11 months on from my first blog entry and the time of year that is traditionally used to look back and (test) reflect, where am I now ?
Sitting with the test team, that's where - thats what I call getting test infected.

Though it took my boss all year to convince the board to allow a developer to switch roles to being a tester. So that means one of my goals for next year is glaringly obvious - educate the board into the value of testing and get them to realise that the programmers should be doing testing anyway.

And so it starts - VSTE now installed on my machine and starting to explore what it offers. All the right words seem to be there - unit tests, code coverage, load testing, manual tests. Just the fact that they are there and people are discussing about how to use them is a giant step in the right direction.

So it was with a mixture of excitment and nerves that I went over to a developers desk as he proudly showed me the first unit tests he'd written

Here's the EXE now bash away at it and see if you can make it crash.
If you can't then ship it.
So much easier than having to think about testing in all it's flavours and methods.

Finally, after a year of pressurising management, the small company I work for is ready to start with some proper test processes and procedures. At the same time there is also a push from the developers to try out an agile approach and use SCRUM for the new projects that are planned to happen. A developer who wants to move into testing could be very very busy....