I was at a customer site not so long ago giving a course on Agile Software Development and part of the course was an introduction to test-driven development. (TDD) TDD is a process whereby the requirements are specified as a set of tests and the developers use the number of tests passing, or failing, to measure the amount of progress in the system. In the middle of one of my talks, the head of testing rose from his seat and asked; "So you′re saying that we should let the developers know what the tests are before they even start coding?" After I replied in the affirmative he responded with, "That would be cheating! If we did that, the developers would then only write code to pass the tests!" That particular manager′s opinion is one I′ve found to be reasonably common among testers and it′s one I′ve always found difficult to understand. There seems to be a general rule in some organisations that once the requirements have been captured, there should be no comm...