Wow! Many thanks to everyone who commented on my MacBook 13″ v. MacBook Pro 15″ dilemma. Your comments are helping me tremendously.

(For the curious: while I haven’t ordered it yet, I’m leaning toward the 13″. I have the iMac with a big screen for when I’m in my office, and 13″ is easier to deal with on a plane. And y’all have allayed any concerns I might have had about performance differences between the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Now I just have to pick a color. Though I gotta say that while I’d love to get the black machine, I have a really hard time justifying paying that much more for a different color. But I digress…)

Next question:

As you can probably imagine, email is a big part of my life.

I’ve tried GMail, and I do use my GMail account on occasion, but I just can’t let go of my need for a local repository of email archives with folders. I like having “buckets” to put things into and I need to have my email client fully functional even when I don’t have an Internet connection. (It’s that using-it-on-a-plane thing again.)

So that means I’ll need a good email client for the Mac that can keep (LOTS of) messages organized on the local hard drive, that supports good/fast searching on any email field, that can synchronize between machines (completely, including folders), and that supports archiving off old email.

Outlook has done a barely good enough job of supporting my organization and archiving scheme on Windows. And I gave up synchronization on Windows as a lost cause some years ago since everything I tried was far too cumbersome. So I want something better than Outlook on the Mac. And the synchronization has to be flawless and frictionless.

I’ve played a little with Mail (the default Mac email client). I love the fact that it’s integrated with Spotlight. And I’m intrigued by the .mac synchronization feature. If it can really synchronize my email seamlessly, it would be worth the annual subscription fee.

So…any advice? Will Mail + .mac do what I need for email? Or is there something better I should consider?

I’ve been not-so-quietly converting to Mac from Windows over the last few months.

Windows Vista put the nail in the coffin, but I started switching even before I started thinking about upgrading from Windows XP to Vista. It all started when I spent some time working with the incredibly cool people at Pivotal Labs. They made the transition to mostly Macs over the last year, and I became a convert too. Having full blown real UNIX under the covers is what really did it for me.

My transition has been gradual. First I acquired an iMac for doing development work - Ruby, Ruby on Rails, etc. And it’s now become an indispensible part of my office infrastructure responsible for keeping my files (I’m keeping both code and my course materials under subversion these days), and also for my nightly backups.

But now it’s time to take the next big step and replace my Windows-based laptop.

And here’s where I’m torn. Do I go with the more portable and more economical MacBook with the 13″ monitor (souped up with extra memory), or do I go with the slicker 15″ MacBook Pro.

I run Eclipse and other development environments mostly for Ruby-related development and writing sample code in JavaScript. I do presentations. I write. I need to be able to demo testing-related tools like Selenium. My biggest concerns are performance and portability, in that order.

Any advice from those who switched before me?

A reader wrote to ask me, “My team and I have been discussing the definition of ‘test’ and ‘testing.’ What’s your definition?”

There are almost as many definitions of software testing as there are books on the topic.

• In his 1979 book The Art of Software Testing, Glenford Myers said, “Testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors.”
• Kaner, Falk and Nguyen agreed in their 1999 book, Testing Computer Software (2nd Ed): “The purpose of testing a program is to find problems in it.”
• In his 1983 book The Complete Guide to Software Testing, Bill Hetzel said, “Testing is any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results.”
• The 1990 IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology (Std 610.12-1990) says testing is, “The process of operating a system or component under specified conditions, observing or recording the results, and making an evaluation of some aspect of the system or component.”

But whatever definition of testing you subscribe to, the result of testing is information: information about bugs, discrepancies, misunderstandings, current status, and software behavior under a variety of conditions.

Dale Emery and I discussed this at length and decided that we agree that: Testing is a process of gathering information by making observations and comparing them to expectations.

(Please note that this definition is intentionally vague about where those expectations come from.)

That leaves the question about the definition of the word “test.”

There are numerous definitions including the one in the IEEE glossary (Standard 610.12) that defines “test” as “An activity in which a system or component is executed under specified conditions, the results are observed or recorded, and an evaluation is made of some aspect of the system or component.”

However, Dale and I find a slight reframe helpful: A test is an experiment designed to reveal information, or answer a specific question, about the software or system.

Anyone have definitions for “Testing” and “Test” that you like better?