The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” rings true whether you’re staring at a centuries-old painting, listening to a busker’s music reflect off the tiles in a subway station, or testing software. It’s one thing to evaluate quality, but how do we evaluate how we evaluate quality?

Mughees Minhas is the senior director of product management for Redwood Shores-based Oracle Corporation where he specializes in application testing, database performance diagnostics, and data center monitoring and optimization. We recently had the opportunity to talk to Mughees about the rise of the cloud, market consolidation, and risk management.

Test automation can turn into a real pain in the neck if a designated team is in charge of it or if the automators work on it as a separate project. In this article, Lisa Crispin seconds Bob Jones’s recent call for whole-team test automation and elaborates on the dangers of relegating test automation to an isolated project rather than integrating it into the overall software development process.

Testers and developers can be friends. In fact, on teams working at a breakneck pace to deliver software, they must be friendly enough to rely on each other. However, there are a few sure-fire ways to ruin that relationship before it begins—and potentially make testing both irrelevant and unwelcome. Marlena Compton lists seven such ways here, along with suggestions for avoiding disaster.