while I did not read your article, I totally agree with the idea that test engineers need to be able to code. In fact, we were discussing this just last night when we were trying to put out a job description for a QA position. I've seen too many testers (especially for web applications) who just go through the app one page at a time. The QA cycle is too long, and they tend to skip many tests. Automation is the way to go, albeit there're technical difficultis. For perl, WWW::Mechanize and HTTP::Recorder are great modules.