During testing, testers mostly stress the 'Bold' part of the software and comfortably overlook the 'Beautiful' side. Beauty and functionality are treated as two extreme ends in software quality, where only one of the two can meet perfection at a given time. But the viewers of the famous soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful know very well that both are important. In this article, Yogita Sahoo explains why aesthetics are such an important contribution.

Testers are often on the critical path for getting a software release out. They must plan carefully in order to minimize the critical path, while still doing a complete job of testing. This schedule pressure is taken to an extreme when a production server must be taken offline in order to deploy the software, and everyone is waiting for the final test results before the system can go live again. Karen Johnson describes her company's carefully planned and orchestrated method for doing a final check of an installed system. Her story is relevant to e-commerce companies as well as IT shops that are under pressure to keep systems updated while minimizing downtime.