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Software developers and testers are guided by different motives, pressures and perspectives. Developers are motivated to complete code quickly and accurately and move on to the next problem. Testers are required to quickly find and report problems within the system. In the course of a project, the more defects testers find and submit to developers, the less time developers have to work on them, and communication may break down. Members of the project team commonly start to rely on entering short descriptions and comments into a defect-tracking system as a means of communication. In this article, the author provides some techniques that can improve communication between testers and developers and help them in fixing problems faster. INSET: Face TO Face.

This article reports that Microsoft Corp. made its first concerted effort to court midsize companies with a Windows Server System promotion, following the success of its software package aimed at small businesses. Companies with 25 to 250 personal computers will be targeted with the new discounted offer for a single stock-keeping unit that combines three copies of the standard edition of Windows Server 2003, one instance of Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition and the workgroup edition of Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.