The relationship was wildly exciting and adventurous when it began, but soon Dion Johnson discovered the scandalous truth about his new friend, Record & Playback. Not wanting to endure or support such deceitful behavior, Dion embarked on a campaign against Record & Playback. With the intervening years acting as a buffer, he now wants to give Record & Playback a second chance. In this column, find out how Dion plans to save the relationship from totally dissolving.

Miska Hiltunen takes a look at his own Tick-the-Code Inspection, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's study of happiness, and how you can cultivate quality through practical methods of empowering your software engineers to improve their own work.

The more complicated the system to test, the bigger the headache. Chris Meisenzahl takes a look at how you can take the pain out of testing complicated software systems with VMware’s virtualization tools—VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, and VMware ESX Server.

An overwhelmingly harsh test will expose dramatic vulnerabilities, but stress testing requires sensitivity to the unexpected. In this article, Michael Bolton directs readers out of the automated-testing comfort zone and toward better methods of spotting unanticipated problems.