Last week at RubyFringe Luke Francl gave a talk called Testing is Overrated. I wasn’t there, but Joey was and blogged about it.

Some highlights of the Luke’s position are

  • Good QA testers are worth their weight in gold.
  • Unit testing finds certain errors; manual testing others; usability testing and code reviews still others.
  • the peer pressure of knowing your code will be scrutinized helps ensure higher quality right off the bat
  • Another huge problem with developer tests is that they won’t tell you if your software sucks
  • no single technique is effective at detecting all defects

All-in-all, it a pretty good primer on why just relying on your build system to tell you whether you can ship or not is a bad idea. I suspect I’ll be using some of this material next month for my talk at Agile.