Brian Marick argues for using testers at the requirements analysis stage of a project. He says, "While QA is primarily about process, testing—my specialty—is about product. Whatever else a tester might do, she certainly eventually exercises the product with the aim of discovering problems a user might encounter. This essay is about that 'whatever else' the tester does."

The next time someone says to you something like, "You can't test quality into a software project," you might reply, "Well, you can't manage it in either." There may be a pregnant pause, but perhaps it will lead to thoughtful discussions about testing and quality. At the very least, it'll make those twin subjects a whole lot less (shh!) Dullsville and boring!

For automated testing, expected results are generated using a test oracle. Here is a look at how heuristic oracles can strike a balance between exhaustive comparison and no comparison at all.

The authors have overcome a lot of the roadblocks to systems testing, especially automated testing. In this article they present their ideas and techniques that are easy to implement (for example, test clusters, templates, and navigation methods).