Despite the risks, many companies do not have a formal release process. This article will guide you through some simple steps to verify your software prior to release.

We're all looking for an effective "Distant Early Warning" line of testing: a procedure that will minimize integration bugs, reduce the risk of low quality by allowing bugs to be caught early, make it easier to debug, and improve the visibility of the status of the system under test. One practice that meets those needs is the "nightly"—essentially a daily build and sanity test of the product.

Before they started using T-VEC, David Statezni's group was manually creating and running requirements tests and separately creating and running code coverage tests. T-VEC's features allowed them to save time.

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."