Met Mark Quirk of Microsoft today for lunch today. Good to remind oneself that there are many good technicians at MS who aren't just marketroids - and that in the triumvirate of sales, macketing and engineerin, all three are important if everyone is going to get paid.

But I'd hope that the marketing people always pass their brochures past the engineers before publishing them (and that the engineers have the veto)! How's that for optimism?

A couple of possible ideas for Reg Developer came out of this.

Mark claims that Team System is making testing and test coverage transparent to management in a constructive way. Agitar claims much the same for its Java tools. Now, I wonder if a "compare and contrast" review of both products would be interesting?

And we also got into project management and how you make sure that what looks best for your developers is also best for the company... It's usually easier and cheaper to manage people properly than fake it, I think, and managing by fear of the sack or fear of missing out on a bonus is faking it IMHO.

Development is a much broader topic than coding....