The Latest

Turn to The Last Word, where software professionals who care about quality give you their opinions on hot topics. This month, read why perhaps software should come equipped with seat belts and an air bag.

We're pleased to bring you technical editors who are well respected in their fields. Get their take on everything that relates to the industry, technically speaking. In this issue, find out why our guest editor thinks he's found the bug that will once again bring testers to the forefront—a bug that dwarfs Y2K and could put big, rich software companies out of business.

Vendors try to protect their source code from would-be attackers, but it takes only one chink in the armor for a good reverse engineer to penetrate all the defenses so carefully put in place. Find out how to methodically uncover patterns to help you predict where the attacks will be focused and how they will be carried out.

Managers need to talk about goals, strategy, and mission. Managers need to talk about how daily work keeps the business humming. Esther writes about how important it is for managers to also ask questions and listen.

Mustering the best project or test team is key to any project's success. In this column, Johanna Rothman explains her interviewing techniques to help you find the perfect candidate. Find out if your candidates are qualified before they become part of your team. Johanna's methods cover six typical questions that will help you build a better test team.

Using a challenging client engagement as a case study, Rex Black shows you how he and a team of test engineers created an integrated, automated unit, component, and integration testing harness, and a lightweight process for using it.

A Web service provides an interface for sending and receiving information, but it doesn't have a user interface. Instead, everything is done via requests and methods. So how does one go about testing such interfaces?