Seeing such a thing would definitely be a day of joy. Too bad that day of joy is still a couple of years ahead, at best, unless Sun is going to do something dramatic about their release cycle for the JDK...
Perhaps more than we'd think?
There appears to be quite a long thread going on at TheServerSide.com about whether or not agile development reduces the need for QA staff. Apparently it all started from Floyd Marinescu's blog entry about what Scott Ambler had said in his presentation to the Toronto Association of Systems & Software Quality.
The TSS thread has a lot of FUD flying around, although Dave Rooney and Scott Ambler seemed to be doing a pretty good job at keeping it real. Scott's description of what he actually said in his presentation can be found from this post near the middle of the discussion thread.
We sort of touched on this topic yesterday in the closing panel of Testaus 2006 as well. I really do believe that good professional testers are worth their salt also in the context of agile development. It's the grunt work of regression testing that test automation, for example, off-loads from testing staff and the time savings automation yields on regression testing can be used for more productive and more exciting work--the kind of stuff we're actually better than the computer.
Also, the change is not going to be quick. There's plenty of learning to do and, frankly, not everyone is into that sort of thing. In the meantime, some organizations are able to get an edge over the competition with effective test automation and skilled testers with a smart mix of approaches such as context-driven and session-based, exploratory testing techniques. It's those organizations that are both creating better software and doing it faster.
As you may have noticed, the blog software at radio.javaranch.com was upgraded recently and we're now running on version 1.9.1. In practice, that means some new features (like the tags link right under the blog title) and, what's even better, less spam due to the nifty little captcha implementation Simon threw in as a bonus. For you, my dear reader, that means you'll have to answer a simple math quiz when you're posting a comment on my blog. I'm hoping this will finally get rid of the link spam I've already gotten used to removing every day...
I've been running a private Subversion repository on my DreamHost account for some months already and, finally, today they announced in their customer newsletter the official support and a one-click installer for Subversion! That means being able to access your repositories over HTTP from practically anywhere.
Hooray!
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