Software testing is a skill. Experience, training, self-study, and a good intuition are what make a good software test engineer. Most test engineers I know are continually striving to learn more about technology. A test engineer is expected to know at least a little about practically everything-from operating systems to networks to databases-in order to be able to find bugs and report them articulately. What I always say to new testers is that this is a great profession for those of us who love to learn continuously. It's like you've never left college-you must study constantly. (Of course, that also makes it a good place to be if you like to feel constantly inadequate! You can never know enough.) So, this book is for that self-motivated test engineer who is intent on continually upgrading his or her knowledge and now wants to learn more about automated software testing.

This book is also for you test leads and managers who want to know what Visual Basic can do for your test project. A not-so-well-kept secret of automated software testing is that the major tools available commercially don't do everything you need them to do, in spite of their advertisements. It's probably unrealistic to expect any tool to be able to fully support the automated testing required for so many diverse applications.

At the Star East QA conference in May 2000, several speakers said that businesses might need two or three of the major tools to accomplish their tasks effectively. This is not good news, of course, since each one of the major automated testing tools is quite expensive. It didn't surprise me to learn during the "Birds-of-a-Feather" sessions that many companies are using one major automated testing tool and filling in the gaps by writing additional automated test scripts in traditional languages such as Java, C++, Perl, and Visual Basic. This is not a new thing. For years, companies, frustrated at not being able to get a tool to do what they want, have found a programmer or two who has said, "Hey, I could just write that myself."