Why wait to see your candidate work? Implement an audition into the interviewing process and add dimension to your candidate's resume. In this column, Johanna Rothman discusses how you can increase the effectiveness of an interview by implementing a well-planned audition. Whether this audition takes place over the phone or in person, you'll gather a richer perspective of the candidate's capabilities and how easily the applicant can adapt to your working environment. Put your candidate's words to the test; the results of an audition may break the tie between two superb applicants.

In this corner—A harried project manager whose testing time has just been cut in half. And in this corner—A time-honored management tool to scale back project scope and make testing tasks do-able. Johanna Rothman shows us the ropes of timeboxing and explains why time constraints don't have to be a TKO.

During testing, testers mostly stress the 'Bold' part of the software and comfortably overlook the 'Beautiful' side. Beauty and functionality are treated as two extreme ends in software quality, where only one of the two can meet perfection at a given time. But the viewers of the famous soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful know very well that both are important. In this article, Yogita Sahoo explains why aesthetics are such an important contribution.

With Extreme Programming, programmers are taking responsibility for writing their own unit tests. What work does this leave for testers? Some people think that XP saves costs by eliminating the need for testers. Does programmer testing really take the place of tester testing? In this column, Bret Pettichord offers ways for testers to provide value to XP teams.