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The benefits of Web services are becoming widely demonstrated and accepted. However, these benefits are not without their own challenges. How can you enter data and verify the response of a system without a GUI? Are you ready to tame this headless beast?

Fed up with good-ol'-boy salesmen, a manufacturing mindset, and just-get-it-out-the-door directions? A little assertiveness, a few ounces of patience, a dash of charm, a lot of leadership, and some attitude adjustment by everyone might help. Read how one manager made the world a better place to work one small victory at a time.

Back in the day of cross-Atlantic boat travel, luggage that wasn't needed during the long journey was labeled "Not Wanted on the Voyage" and stowed away below decks. In this column, Fiona Charles suggests that testers can also be viewed as heavy baggage and not exactly welcome by some parties during the journey of software development. To understand why others might think this way, Fiona takes a good, hard look at what testers do that could possibly make them undesirable team mates.

The following article is an excerpt from "Agile Testing" by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory.

Part II

Organizational Challenges

When software development organizations implement agile development, the testing or QA team often takes the longest to make the transition. Independent QA teams have become entrenched in many organizations. When they start to adapt to a new agile organization, they encounter cultural differences that are difficult for them to accept. In Part II, we talk about introducing change and some of the barriers you might encounter when transitioning to agile. Training is a big part of what organizations making the transition need, and it's often forgotten. It's also hard to see how existing processes such as audits and process improvement frameworks will work in the agile environment. Going from an independent QA team to an integrated agile team is a huge change.

A hallmark of truly agile teams is an unquenchable desire to continually find new and better ways of developing software. These teams believe that there really are no "best" practices, only practices which work better or worse for them. This line of thinking is even apparent in the first line of the agile manifesto stating "we are uncovering better ways of developing." In this article I will explore two of the most widely accepted agile development practices, test-driven development and continuous integration, and question how these practices can be made better with continuous testing.

Despite our best efforts we need to know what we are going to code before we write the code. And as much as we might like to test before we write the code we can't really run tests until we have some code. Agile overlaps requirements discovery and implementation so coding can start with minimal or outline requirements but there is still a sequence.