Testing doesn't have to begin after the code has been written. In this column, Jeff Patton resurrects the oldest and most overlooked development technique, which can be used to test a product before any piece of it materializes.

This article provides an overview of various tools, integration strategies and their benefits in agile environments. These tools would come in handy in implementing key agile practices like daily builds, refactoring, continuous integration and test driven development.

The $1 billion bug and why no one talks about peer code review.

 It was only supposed to take an hour.

The bad news was that we had a stack of customer complaints. The latest release had a nasty bug that slipped through QA. The good news was that some of those complaints included descriptions of the problem - an unexpected error dialog box - and one report had an attached log file. We just had to reproduce the problem using the log and add this case to the unit tests. Turn around a quick release from the stable branch and we're golden.

Software re-use is a worthy and noble ideal to aim for during any development, but why not let's take a bigger picture view of the whole software development environment. Make the goal to set up our process so that as much as possible is re-used on subsequent projects. Here are some thoughts on achieving this.