James is probably most known for his "good enough"
model of software development. The name leads to knee-jerk
reactions ("good enough for government work" =
"bad"). But the intent is to enable project
teams to think hard about quality means to this project
at this point, instead of relying on prejudice or long-out-of-date
planning. There's is much other good stuff on his web
site (except the part where he calls me "guileless").
I want to take James's exploratory testing course some
day.
Extreme programming is a style of rapid application
development that has some extremely interesting features.
I'm particularly taken with pair programming (all code is
written by two people sitting at a terminal) and the
notion of not designing code to support
future extensions (because you're wrong enough often
enough that a refactor-as-needed approach works better).
Doug has a lot of experience at a broad range of Silicon
Valley companies. I particularly like his ideas about test
automation, such as
heuristic oracles.
Cem Kaner is the senior author of Testing
Computer Software (Kaner, Falk, Nguyen) and
Lessons Learned in Software
Testing (Kaner, Bach, Petticord).
There
are a number of good papers on his site. I've taken his
three-day Testing Computer Software course and recommend
it.
Johanna is a management consultant. Although she's never
been my manager, I'd greet that prospect with joy, rather
than my usual edginess or outright dread. I like her
ideas for dealing with projects in trouble.