Producing regular test status reports makes your progress—and problems—visible to those outside your group. Here's how spending a couple of hours a week on gathering and reporting results can be crucial to your software development team's success.

For any project, the big question is: "Is this software ready to release yet?" Explore how to answer that question with confidence, by learning how to define success and how to gain consensus on release criteria.

You can write simple programs to help with your daily testing tasks using Perl or other scripting languages. Here's a primer on scripting languages and programming skills for testers.

The Ruby language has gained many followers recently. Ruby offers many of the same features that made Perl a popular scripting language, but also has the advantage of being a fully object-oriented language. While developing an object-oriented application in Perl might be a bit clumsy, Ruby supports object-oriented programming quite naturally. This can offer many advantages when developing a large testing application.