I am in the process of reading Mary and Tom Poppendieck's latest book 'Implementing Lean Software Development' and I came across a great quote that is ALL too true in our industry. (I am only 2 chapters in on the book, but so far it is as good as their last book).
'When testing occurs long after coding, test-and-fix churn is inevitable' (churn here is used to describe an item that is a waste of time)
Why is that most big business think it is ok to still have the 'development cycle' followed by the 'test' cycle. I have worked in shops where the testing of the application would not begin until the application was 'feature complete'. Sadly, once they started testing, the test-and-fix cycle would actually be longer then the original development cycle.... how sad.
Anyway, thought this was a great quote.