new year's resolutions

Welcome to the new year!

2009 will be the year I publish a new book on testing and the year I ship my first testing tool since Holodeck oh so many years ago.

I’m thinking about calling the book exploratory testing. Believe it or not the title isn’t taken. Any thoughts on that title? Am I too cheeky by claiming it? By happy coincidence the material I am preparing is on manual testing of a strikingly exploratory nature.

I don’t get to name the tools though as they will be shipping as part of Visual Studio 2010 and are currently code named after various islands in the Puget Sound. My boss (yes, there is some poor unlucky soul here at the empire who is forced to claim me as a direct) is in the process of blogging about those tools our team is building. Allow me to introduce Amit Chatterjee at his corner of MSDN. Please send along your condolences for him having to be the one to write my review.

Also, based on reader feedback, it will also be the year that I expose more insider details about testing culture and practice at Microsoft. Those are the most read of my blog posts and I’m going to take that as a hint. Although, much of the thunder has already been aired by my colleagues in their new book How We Test Software at Microsoft . That book's a good read and a high bar for me to match when my own book comes out in a few months.