I. M. Wright’s “Hard Code”: A Decade of Hard-Won Lessons from Microsoft®

Chapter 4. Cross Disciplines

In this chapter:
April 1, 2002: “The modern odd couple? Dev and Test”
July 1, 2004: “Feeling testy—The role of testers”
May 1, 2005: “Fuzzy logic—The liberal arts”
November 1, 2005: “Undisciplined—What’s so special about specialization?”
January 1, 2009: “Sustained engineering idiocy”
May 1, 2011: “Test don’t get no respect”

Software development, when done well, requires a broad skill set. You need to truly understand the customer and the business. You need strong user experience design skills and knowledge of usability (even for API work). You need engineering design skills, software development skills, software testing skills, and tremendous familiarity with the target platform, which could be a server farm.

Sure, ...