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For many organizations, software quality is an elephant found by blind men who think they can see. People hold different opinions about quality based on their work roles and interests.

As software professionals, we all care about quality. We focus our efforts on building quality into the code and testing to assess quality and find errors before our customers do.

There are many reasons why outsourcing IT activities requires extra attention, especially when it concerns software testing. Examples of complete failures are common, and "backsourcing" is not uncommon today.

Many software test organizations count bugs; however, most do not derive much value from the practice, and other metrics can actually harm the quality of their software or their organization.

When people work closely together, there's bound to be friction and irritations. Some people find it difficult to bring up these issues directly, so they hint and hope. And when the hint doesn't help, the irritation can grow out of proportion. Team members' ability to give peer-to-peer feedback both about work and interpersonal relationships is critical to developing a highly productive team. Esther Derby tells us about a team torn apart by an unattractive personal habit and offers some advice for talking about touchy interpersonal issues.

Connect with an expert to learn how to work smarter and learn new ways to uncover more defects. In this issue, Michael Bolton dishes out commentary on why testers who master skills instead of memorizing techniques are relished in the software industry.