Scott Sehlhorst (developer.*)has written a concise article on how to do smart software testing. While I have worked with non-technical people who wanted “full-coverage” testing of all builds, and have also worked with non-technical people who wanted to skip testing and just go live and “fix it in the field,” I have not previously had the numbers to say “yes, this has been tested and we are 99% confident that the application is 99% bug free.” Without having the numbers and formulae at hand the best I could previously say was “I am pretty confident that it is mostly bug-free.” Well, I know that the 99/99 numbers sound a lot more confident than that, and I am less likely to spend a week running tests to get as close to full coverage as possible now that I have this bit in my tool-belt.

I have a minor (or possibly major) problem with my favorite Java IDE, NetBeans. It seems that even though version 5.5 Q-build has been promoted to Build 1, I still have issues with using version 4.

I was much more comfortable with the workings of version 3 and earlier, where setting up projects and working within projects seemed much simpler. I still find myself frustrated with version 4 and the need to explicitly import the libraries I routinely use. With version 3 and earlier I imported those libraries generically for all projects. I still haven’t figured out how to do that in version 4 or 5. So now that the world is moving on what am I to do? I guess I will just have to upgrade and bite the bullet.