I have now moved to the Global Testing Practice for my employer. This creates a whole new set of learning challenges for me, but it also returns me "to my roots" in a way, since I entered the I.T. industry in the Summer of 1978 as a maintenance programmer and tester. I cut my teeth on testing and debugging other people's code. I still carry in my head a small list of names of people who I would like to encounter one day in a stuck elevator so that I can indulge in what diplomats call "a full and frank exchange of views" concerning their grossly defective coding practices. But I digress...
I am currently researching the state of the art in software testing. The Extreme Programming paradigm has led to a number of thought leaders trying to advance the art of software testing. Kent Beck himself popularized the concept of Test-Driven Development, and I am currently working through his book on the subject.
Ward Cunningham, who was one of the founders and popularizers of Wiki, and who at various times in the past few years has worked for Microsoft (as an Architect in the Patterns and Practices group) and the Eclipse Foundation (heading up the Committer group process), and who is now the CTO for AboutUs, has also done work on testing automation in the past. Some of the testing automation work is visible here.
I have also been looking into other possible testing approaches, as defined here and here. I also found what approximates to a manifesto for the concept of context-driven testing. Some of this is fairly and basically obvious (like the observation that the sort of testing that one does for the control software for the Space Shuttle might be different than the testing for a spreadsheet application), but it never hurts to remind oneself that sometimes there is no "one size fits all" solution approach to a wide variety of problems.