There are two distinct roles in many software projects that are involved with testing: developers and testers. Should they take the same approach to testing, or are there some principles that apply to only one of the roles? What should they do to coordinate their work? Danny Faught went through an exercise to compare and contrast and found that the questions he couldn't answer were as interesting as the questions he could answers.

If a customer asked you to demonstrate to him, within an hour, that your newest software is ready for use, what tests would you run? Are these the same tests that you are now performing in your first hour of regression testing? They should be.

Quality attributes--performance, scalability, availability, maintainability, etc.-are often referred to as the non-functional requirements. Unfortunately, these critical factors often are specified through vague platitudes rather than explicit statements. Participatory, scenario-based architecture reviews are essential to determine if the architecture meets the system's quality attributes as well as the functional requirements. Scenario-based architecture reviews rigorously examine the characteristics of the system to determine strengths, limitations, operating bounds, and overall requirements satisfaction. Results include the impact on and risk of architectural choices for the system. Kevin Bodie details the architecture review planning process, illustrates its execution, and shows you the results with specific deliverables-the Architecture Readout Presentation and Executive Architecture Readout.

The best thing about Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is its flexibility-a heterogeneous computing environment in which different services and service providers can use different technologies; loose coupling of components to allow any application to make use of service capabilities; and ad-hoc integration of applications within and across organizations. However, from a tester's perspective, these very advantages make the testing of Web services and SOA-based applications highly complex. Testing Web services through the front-end of applications is usually ineffective. Tracking defects to their source is difficult because of the layered application designs. Instead, you must design and execute mostly non-functional tests for compliance to standards, interoperability, security, reliability, and performance.