Review By: Michelle Carrier
06/23/2010After reading this book, I reconsidered some projects I worked on in the past. As an analyst in quality-assurance, I’ve been involved in few projects where the technical challenge took priority over the original objective. I’d like at those moments to propose some of the arguments of this book. This is one of the best structured books than I've read on this subject to date. It explains us why it is necessary to join together two worlds which often evolve in a parallel way and sometimes even competing worlds. It goes on to say that collaborating is the only way to avoid the loss of contact with the customer. If the technology that is developed does not correspond to the customer requirements, that it is utterly useless.

The organization of the book makes reference work easy. The end of each chapter includes a section entitled, "Check This/Try This" which is very helpful. At the end of the book, the release checklist is extremely useful and shows you how to better plan for the launch of a product. The solutions suggested in this book are realizable, effective, and beneficial for small companies.

A better collaboration between marketing, development, and QA is key to developing better products. QA people want the best product possible and this is not summarized only with the absence of bugs but also with best releasing the best
products for the customer.

This book speaks about the risks teams face when they concentrate only on the architecture of a system. The book brings suggestions on points often ignored during the development: distribution, licensing, security, maintenance,and training. The guiding principle is the association of two groups: architects of systems (architect) and marketing (markitect). When developers lose the contact with the customer the price paid is very high and can even prove fatal.

In short, this is an excellent book, that I advise every QA team member to read and add to their toolbox.