A fascinating post from Microsoft blogger Scott Guthrie on Microsoft's development cycles and especially the automated testing procedures.

I love how after 8 weeks of straight implementation (AKA destabilization) the QA team is called into action for 6-10 weeks to write "detailed" tests to stabilize the code again. Why wait?

... and the not-so surprising answer is: because developers hate writing tests for their own code. So rather than go into the nitty gritty and write their own detailed test suites, the QA team does the dirty work and the developers squash bugs for 2 months. Wow, that's exciting stuff.

If everything is automated like it is on that project, take advantage of it -- make the developers write their own tests. Make them swallow their pride and find their own mistakes right away with a well-written test rather than two months from now in the form of bug reports ... they will be learn to be better coders for it. Otherwise you are just tempting them to implement lazily.

PS> It's funny how shortly after some people were saying that Microsoft didn't get blogs there are suddenly tons of them. What did they do, release a company-wide memo saying "It's OK to blog! PR beat Legal in a foosball game at lunch!"?

I guess so .... and the Microsofties rejoiced.