Many organizations are reluctant to introduce new tools or technologies, or even to update existing ones. The reason is often framed in terms of risk management, but agile teams already have the tools to manage the risk of change: testing and experiments. These approaches together eliminate gaps in risk identification.

The new Advanced Plant Technologies program established by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, will explore ways to use plants' natural responsiveness to their environment as a military sensor to detect and report on the presence of threats such as explosive devices or radioactivity.

Testers need to be both creative and analytical, and those are two features that are very common in musicians. Sure, it might not be writing code, but we’re learning more and more that the building blocks and innate qualities that make for good testers can be more important than the testing skills themselves.