The manuscript is at the printers

We shipped the camera ready manuscript to Wiley yesterday, and it's headed to Malloy printing ... if the schedule holds, it will be a bound book by the end of the month.

And naturally, a reader of a draft pointed out an error today (in a table in the combinatorial testing chapter). Sigh. Time to start compiling errata sheets.

Of course, if it were possible to completely avoid errors, or to absolutely scrub them through human processes, a book about software testing and analysis would not be needed. We'd just prescribe the right magic fairy dust for bug-free software and be done with it. It's the critical shortage of magic fairy dust that makes it a challenging enough problem to motivate a lot of researchers developing a lot of different and complementary approaches that require some real understanding and problem-solving skill to use well.

Camera ready going in on Monday

The manuscript has been through a round of proofreading at Wiley, and is almost through the revisions in response to the proofreader's marks. On Monday evening, February 26, the final camera-ready copy goes back to Wiley. They might still ask for a few small adjustments, but basically we're winding it up now.

Meanwhile Apogeo has agreed to publish the Italian edition, which Mauro will translate. The market for a fairly specialized book in a fairly small language market is pretty limited, but the Italian edition is important to us for obvious reasons, and Apogeo is the right publisher for a high quality book.

The work won't come to an end. There is a solutions manual for the exercises, but it needs some of the polish that we've been applying to the main text. We'll also be working on slides, additional exercises, etc. And (am I too optimistic?) we can start planning revisions for the second edition.