Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?"

Unfortunately for the business analyst (BA), much of the literature regarding agile development focuses on the perspective of the developer, largely ignoring the role of the business analyst. BAs play a key role capturing requirements on large, software-intensive projects. Teams are co-located where programmers and their "customers" interact directly as a means of eliciting requirements. Organizations that are moving toward agile development may wonder if a has a role in agile software development. The answer, as addressed by this paper, is a resounding "Yes."

One of the testing challenges we face is how to handle the large numbers of test cases we sometimes need to create and execute. We can't test everything, but pairwise testing using orthogonal arrays or an all-pairs algorithm can help generate pair combinations that reduce the number of test cases we run while still finding a large percentage of bugs.

Ajax applications are very popular and can be flexible and dynamic, but only if you find the bugs first. Stuart Halloway has the details on tools that Ajax developers use and that will keep your applications dressed to the nines.