[jfe]

become as good a programmer as you possibly can, and learn to write extremely thorough test plans.

put another way, build quality in from the start. ensure that you don't need to fix/update your code or test plan later. if that's unavoidable, at least make doing so as quick and painless as possible.

[shicky]

good advice for automation/development I imagine but for QA this surely doesn't apply as I won't be writing the code?