Everything you want and need to know about software testing, then some. I wish many of the programmers, managers and testers I have worked with had read this book and taken on board some of its notions.

It is aimed at the professional software tester, but touches on every other participant in the software life cycle. It describes testing in the real world - not to prove the software correct, which is unachievable, but to prove it good enough to ship, which you cannot afford not to be achievable. It contains abundant examples of truisms rife in the industry such as: If you measure testers by how many bugs they find it won't encourage them to be better testers, just better bug finders and do not hire failed programmers, they rarely make good testers.

The material is so excruciatingly detailed that reading needs to be broken up into small digestible chunks, but this is the intent of the book, for the professional tester to dip into when required, over months or maybe years as he (or she as the book uses the female pronoun throughout) progresses from novice to expert.

Everyone should read this book, the testers to be better testers and the rest of us in order to be a lot more respectful of our test teams. Highly Recommended.