Testers who point out project risks are often perceived as "negative" thinkers. Software test consultant Fiona Charles (an optimist by nature and a pessimist by trade) writes about how a culture of unthinking optimism pervades our organizations and our society, and describes some of its detrimental effects on software projects.

There has been a lot of recent discussion on Twitter about the use of mocking frameworks and writing readable tests. Here is a roundup of some of the recent blogs on the subject.

Making Tests More Readable

2010 brings with it multiple trends for project management. It is not surprising that many of these trends will help mature the world of project management as we know it today. Just as businesses must be flexible with market conditions, project management professionals and organizations must also adapt accordingly.

A handful of years ago, some of my clients began to ask me, “How are we doing?” My replies were always something like, “You’re doing pretty well at pair programming, and I like how teams have shifted from writing requirements documents to talking about user stories. But teams really haven’t embraced the idea of automated testing yet, and that’s where we need to focus most.” But this wasn’t the type of answer they wanted; they wanted to know, “How are we doing compared to our competition?”