Is the tester doing a good job or a bad job when she proves that the program is full of bugs? It’s a bad job from some developers’ points of view. Ridiculous as it seems, there are project managers blaming testers for the late shipment of a product and developers complaining (often jokingly) that “the testers are too tough on the program.” Obviously, there is more to successful testing than bug counts. Here are some tips about how testers can build successful relationships with developers.

Ms. Dekkers and Ms. Derby talk about various management issues (e.g., promotions based on technical skills instead of people management skills, and the importance of interpersonal skills training for managers) and modeling organizational change.

Exploratory software testing is a powerful and fun approach to testing. In some situations, it can be orders of magnitude more productive than scripted testing. I haven't found a tester yet who didn't, at least unconsciously, perform exploratory testing at one time or another. Yet few of us study this approach, and it doesn't get much respect in our field. It's high time we stop the denial, and publicly recognize the exploratory approach for what it is: scientific thinking in real time. Friends, that's a good thing.

This paper focuses on the strategies and challenges of testing real-world, large and complex, highly available clustered systems in the following areas: Test planning, Strategies and methodologies; Defect tracking processes; System Configuration tests; Cluster and storage fault injection tests; Effective testing practices.

The information provided in this paper is aimed at helping test engineers understand many of the quality assurance issues involved in testing large and complex systems.