Testing smesting ...

Today’s lunchtime addition to my book:

Tim the testing manager is talking about their testing:

‘What we found was that we could find a surprisingly large number of defects without doing any actual testing.  This happened when the requirements were ambiguous or misunderstood.  Writing the test scripts clarified the requirements. 

‘Now, we used this approach to find defects without testing but we still had to rework them.  Here’s my idea: why don’t we write tests for each feature, before we write the code, so that we can prevent defects before anything is built?  The tests will essentially be used instead of an ambiguous specification.  As we learn more about each feature we can update the tests.  How does that sound?’.

And then someone points to this in a yahoo group: http://www.butunclebob.com/ArticleS.UncleBob.AgilePeopleStillDontGetIt