I stumbled across a presentation by Luke Francl called: Testing is Overrated. He could have called it: “programmer testing is overrated” but that doesn’t have as much zing to it.

His slides display a refreshing reminder to look for balance in your testing techniques and coverage models. What is especially refreshing is that this is coming from a programmer who is studying testing effectiveness seriously.

Look through the slides and his handout. They provide a nice minimal, complementary and diverse set of testing ideas that when used together can be incredibly powerful.

(If you don’t feel like clicking the links, he recommends a combination of the following: programmer unit testing, skilled manual testing, usability testing, and code reviews.)

Update: Apparently I am behind the times, and Matt Heusser blogged about this very topic in August. It’s worth being reminded of though. 🙂