A Tester Is For Life

Transcription

A Tester Is For Life
Not Just For Christmas
The Software Testing Club
www.softwaretestingclub.com
December 2010
Introduction
In November 2010 we launched a new community charity project called “A Tester is for life,
not just for Christmas”. The response was overwhelming and this eBook you are reading
now is the results of this experiment. The aim of the eBook was to ask a simple set of ques-
tions and garner responses from you, the Testing Community. The responses are enlightening, inspiring and in some cases, hilarious.
This eBook is free for you to download and distribute as you see fit, but all we ask in return
is that you consider donating to Oxfam via our Just Giving site:
www.justgiving.com/testingclub.
We’re aiming to raise as much money as possible for Oxfam and your help is very much
appreciated.
A big Thank You to all who have contributed to this eBook and we do hope it will give all
who read it some little nuggets of interest, or at least inspire you to question elements of
your learning and testing. As a minimum I do hope some of the testers mentioned in this
eBook will give you someone new to follow or get in touch with. As with most community
eBooks we actually got a lot more responses than we could realistically fit in this eBook.
As such we didn’t include every response so apologies for those who didn’t make it in, but
early in the New Year we will be publishing the whole response set via The Software Testing Club blog. http://blog.softwaretestingclub.com
Sit back, relax and read about what
others in the community are thinking
about testing.
Happy holiday time to you all.
Rob Lambert
&
Rosie Sherry
&
All at The Software Testing Club.
Antonio Robres
5 Books that you have found invaluable in your learning
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context Driven Approach by Cem Kaner,
James Bach, and Bret Pettichord
• Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design
by James A. Whittaker
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory
• How to Break Web Software: Functional and Security Testing of Web Applications and
Web Services by Mike Andrews and James A. Whittaker
• How We Test Software at Microsoft (PRO-best Practices) by Alan Page, Ken Johnston
and Bj Rollison
How to improve the software testing craft?
Read, read and read, follow several blogs to met different perpectives of software testing
and practice with all this perspective to find the result most comfortable oneself. Participate
in the forums and discussions and coach the new people to improve your testing skills.
What is the most valuable “tool” you use to aid your testing?
There are many tools to complete my testing but the most important for me is my brain.
What’s the most “impressive” bug you’ve ever found?
My most impressive bug found is a security bug inside the public web application on my
company. The bug was permiting the access to the financial module through a SQL inyection proccedure.
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made when testing?
Accept impossible test plans in the available time.
What’s the biggest challenge facing Testing currently?
For me the biggest challenge in the Testing comunity today is the transition to new Agile
enviroments like Scrum or XP where the role of the tester is different than the traditional
environments.
What do you think will be the biggest challenge over the next 2-3 years?
One of the biggest challenges to testing in the next years is probably the crowd testing and
the outsourcing.
What are your views on Testing Certification Schemes?
For me are not necessary the actual certifications because of only evaluates the memory
capacities of the tester. Testing is more than check, you need develop and improve your
soft skills also to be a good tester. In the other hand, it’s necessary in the testing comunity
a common vocubalary or glossary to speak all the same language.
The most exciting, interesting and motivating testers in the community...
• Michael Bolton
• Lisa Crispin
• Andy Glover
• Markus Gärtner
• Lynn McKee
Your country of residence
Spain
Want to say a few words about this eBook and the charity it supports?
I think is a very good idea! The objective is adequated and I think that the people can donate a little contribution to adquire this “ebook”.
Why do you love software testing?
There are several reasons why I love testing. The first is because every day I learn one
new thing. The second is because since childhood I love smashing things! I love my work, I
enjoy with it!
Contact Details
My name is Antonio Robres and you can found me in twiiter with the name @twiindan, in
my blog (in spanish) www.softqatest.com and in my email twiindan@gmail.com
Donate to www.justgiving.com/testingclub/
Andreas Prins
• The Art of Software Security Testing: Identifying Software Security Flaws by Chris
Wysopal
• The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws by
Dafydd Stuttard and Marcus Pinto
• TMap Next by Tim Koomen, Leo van de Aalst, Bart Broekman and Michiel Vroon
A tester can sharpen his or her skills by setting goals. If you have a goal every day you will
continuous learn something. Second, don’t learn only in the testing domain. Take other
domains other activities to see how that works out. Copy the things you learned to the testing field.
Web proxy tool like WebScarab to intercept the traffic between your browser and the server.
A button to a very important function that was only disabled. Via the direct URL I get access
to the backend of the system while I was only a simple visitor.
Not asking the right question to my test team. So they give me half of the information what
I wrote down in my report and send to the project manager. Based on this information decision where made that aren’t the right decisions.
How we can automate the repetetive tasks to have time to deepen other aspects of software testing.
What do you think will be the biggest challenge over the next 2 -3 years?
How can we be involved from the early beginning of a project? This is the case for many
years and will be a case for the next year.
This is very useful for a couple of domains. Think about the payments schemes. With a lot
of different parties, the whole clearing and settlement principles a scheme is obligate. Testing Certification schemes must be done to be sure everything works fine at a lower level.
This happens in domains like: Electronic Health Record, Public Transport, Mobile commu-
nications and others.. Every tester has to realize that testing these schemes is not the only
thing that must be done. A lot of other testers are still needed.
Netherlands
Life is a gift, share it with others!
Because it’s an every day learning, and motivating others job. All things of life are applicable at testing.
Contact Details
twitter.com/andreasprins
andreasprins@testingthefuture.net
Skype: Andreas_Prins
Stephen Hill
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Kaner, Bach and Pettichord
• Perfect Software and Other Illusions about Testing by Weinberg
• Agile Testing by Crispin and Gregory
• Don’t Make Me Think by Kruger
• How We Test Software at Microsoft by Page, Johnson and Rollison
Pit your wits against other testers and experts in the craft by attending Weekend Testing
sessions, peer conferences like the Test Management Forum and spend as much time
communicating with testers as you can.
Might be cliched but for me it is my brain. I can use tools to drive tests forward but I have
to think up the tests in the first place! I have to know what to look for and how and where to
look for it. Besides that I have a suite of in-house developed tools to compare our products
against. I also regularly use tools such as Mantis, VMWare Workstation, SoapUI and Hex
Workshop to aid my testing.
Some mangled logic would have caused our product to muddle up properties on a street
presenting them in the wrong order. This would have caused chaos for things like travel to
work distance calculations.
I still get hot under the collar when I think of it: our product can display data in either Welsh
or English and I missed the fact that the Welsh alternates were not being displayed until
really late in the testing cycle. Needless to say I was very unpopular because it was an
expensive bug to put right at that stage.
Managing expectations. We are dealing with huge shifts to the way in which computing
services are organised as companies move to providing services via ‘the Cloud’. It is virtually (excuse the pun) impossible to replicate an environment from one minute to the next
because of contention for resources which, as testers, we know very little about. Previ-
ously when we had full control over the physical hardware in our test environments we had
a static point-of-reference that we could say “yes, I am comparing like with like” but this is
much harder with ‘Cloud’ services.
As use of the Cloud increases and organisations distribute services more and more the
current challenges will be exacerbated. Additionally, I think there is going to be a skills
problem unless there is a recognition that ‘anyone’ cannot test - you have to have the right
mindset.
A holder of an ISEB Practitioner Certificate can show that he has written 4 essays mention-
ing all the things in the syllabus without deviating too much from the point; ISEB Foundation
and Intermediate holders have been able to remember enough facts to correctly choose
the right option from 40 multiple choice questions from a single worldview of testing (struc-
tured testing using the V-model of all things). Big deal. Unfortunately the topics covered in
the syllabus are of real relevance only to people who are contractually obliged to follow the
V-model of software development.
James Bach - Michael Bolton - James Christie - Rob Lambert - Darren McMillan
What a great idea! It is good, too, to support Oxfam with all the help they are in the community.
I love engaging my brain with getting to the root of problems and am driven by a love for
ensuring the software we put out is of the highest quality. I do not like seeing software that
makes the organisation putting it out look amateurish and strive to ensure that does not
happen to us!
Contact Details
Skype:
Blog:
Stephen.Hill.uk http://pedantictester.wordpress.com Twitter:
@Stephen_J_Hill
E-mail: dogbertius@gmail.com
Mark Walsh
• Don’t make me think : Steve Krug
• The Web Testing Handbook : Steven Splaine, Stefan P. Jaskiel
• Neuro Web Design : Susan Weinschenk
• Lessons Learned In Software Testing : James Bach, Bret Pettichord, Cem Kaner
Obtain feedback after software implementations regarding issues found directly after the
product went live. User feedback, call centre issues raised, live bug list etc. This will tell
you what bugs were missed while in test and help plan for this next time. Test a variety of
software, not specialise and test the same thing over and over. Sit with other testers and
watch them test.
Firefox and all the add-ins it has. (invaluable for web testing) Selenium for regression
testing after a new build has been deployed. Twitter for staying current with testing best
practises
I used to work for NASA and once found a bug in the rocket launch management system
that would have resulted in 20 rockets being sent to the moon unmanned and when they
fell to earth would have destroyed the planet. (Only joking). However as an aside, would be
good to have a humour section in the ebook. Maybe a collection of all the Dilbert cartoons
that relate to testing, or a section on funniest moments while testing. I keep a log called ‘you
couldn’t make it up’ of all the unbelievable things that go on in the companies I work for.
I was working for a major supermarket testing EPoS terminals (checkouts) and thought I
had sent remote command to my test checkout to re-boot it, but had in fact I had sent the
command to every single checkout in every store. I didn’t realise until the call centre phones
all went crazy.
Testing high volume websites as it is difficult to performance test accurately, the user base
is worldwide and can be hundreds of thousands at anyone time, your users all have different devices, browsers and operating systems, and all navigate the internet differently.
The move towards information on demand, regardless of location. Mobile devices are sell-
ing in their millions and nearly everyone seems to be moving towards being online 24/7 and
require websites that work well and quickly on all devices.
If I was synical I would say that recruitment agents must be taking a cut of all examination
fees in return for insisting that job candidates are certified. If a company relies on certification above reading the content of CV then they are very short sighted. I agree there needs
to be a way to sort out the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the interview process, but
feel a written test relevant to the testing project that has the vacancy is far more effective I
wonder how many testers say they are certified on their CV but are not ?
England
I find there is a shortage of testing handbooks that are current and relevant so to compile a
free one, and subsequently encourage donations to a worthwhile cause is a terrific idea.
It’s like a treasure hunt finding bugs. There are clues to where the bugs are and it may take
a number of different attempts before finding them. However once you have found them
there is a sense of achievement and the knowledge that your efforts were justified and that
you have improved the quality of a product.
Contact Details
Email : walshmark4@gmail.com
Twitter : mark_walsh_
Phil Kirkham
• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition - Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, and Hung Q. Nguyen
• Quality Software Management Vol1-4 Jerry Weinberg
• Agile Testing Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
• Bridging the Communication Gap by Gojko Adzic
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby: for Teams, Testers, and You by Brian Marick
Get involved with the testing community. Answer questions on the forums - that makes you
think aboout your beliefs and experiences. Write a blog - again, it makes you think about
your work and what you are doing. Participate in the weekend testing sessions
It was actually a very simple standard run of the mill bug where leaving an input field blank
would crash the app. It was impressive because a dev had proudly challenged me to break
the app and I did it within 30 seconds. It gave me so much credibility with the devs that they
wanted to know what my magic trick was and after that they started to test their code before
handing it over
Not thinking about how the data that would be needed for testing would be set up. Lots of
red faces when testing goes nowhere on Day 1 as nothing has been set up and will take a
week to do so
The belief that you can get anyone in, give them a script to run and they can test the product
Testing highly complex systems and testing the multitude of ways that apps are all interconnected over the web.
As I spend too much time removing posts about certification from the STC site I might have
a somewhat biased view. If only the people posting and worrying so much about them
would spend their time and energy learning they would be better off. Though I cant be too
harsh on them as without the magic letters in their CV they cant get past a lot of HR keyword searches
• Rob Lambert
• Marlena Compton
• Markus Gartner
• Matthew Heusser
• Chris McMahon
England
The testing community is a great one - hope the book helps out the larger community out
there.
The intellectual challenge, the awesome community and helping make a product that
people can use.
Contact Details
http://expectedresults.blogspot.com
phil@softwaretestingclub.com
@pkirkham
Ajay Balamurugadas
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Malcolm Gladwell
• The Secret: Rhonda Byrne
• All books by Robin Sharma
• Listen to others but invent for yourself. Build and preserve your reputation.
• Read books, blogs, discuss with people.
• Practice /testing/. There is no use if you know but you cannot execute.
• It is OK to fail, keep trying. Every opportunity will teach you something if you are willing
to learn. So grab every opportunity where you can learn.
• Listen to Dr.Cem’s lectures available on BBST.
www.Google.com
I don’t know if this bug impresses you but I liked this the most. After 20 incorrect logins,
login with correct credentials also failed. If the login screen was cancelled and the application launched again, one could use the correct credentials to login.
Equating credibility with bug counts. Feeling on top of the world finding a lot of bugs which
did not meet the mission.
According to me, the biggest challenge facing the testing industry is : Test cases replac-
ing human brains. Management feels that test cases will solve the problem. If a defect is
missed, add it to the test suite. The vicious circle continues. And finally, testers are bored.
The old problems will repeat. The managers would want to have full control on the test-
ing activity. Test cases will be seen as a measure of coverage. Skilled testers will fight the
battle against useless certifications.
As long as it helps you learn something, go for it. If it is just a 40 multiple choice questionnaire which you could answer even without reading anything, be against it. Go for BBST
courses instead. They will test you unlike a paper exam.
Matthew Heusser
Andy Glover
Michael Bolton
Monirul Islam
India
Awesome job. May God bless everyone :)
I feel I am born to test. Right from childhood, I loved asking questions: ‘What if...’ Once I got
into software testing, I realized that I would be paid if I asked that question again and again
and gave the stakeholders the information.
Contact Details
Email: ajay184f@gmail.com
Skype: ajay184f
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ajay184f
Blog: www.enjoytesting.blogspot.com
Nandagopal
• Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar by James Bach
Testers need to practice problem solving and lateral thinking. Try out puzzles to free up the
stress. Read, read, read and read a lot - there are many interesting blogs about software
testing which provides you with lot of ideas. Then start blogging about your thoughts.
My brain :) I’ve strarted practicing the testing with James Bach’s heuristic model, though I
feel there is long way to go for myself to master it!
I once found a compatibility issue with Mac - I used Ctrl + V in a Mac machine to paste
some text to a field and it corrupted the database. This was an accidental discovery, as I
was testing on a Windows machine a few minutes earlier and just wanted to check the new
feature in Mac. And due to the Windows “hangover” I used the Ctrl + V combination in Mac
as well.
I once missed a registration form issue for 18 builds! The registration field contained a field
“User name”. Me and my teammates tested it for 18 builds and still didn’t try with a user
name which contained spaces in between. We had invited a couple of normal PC users to
check the usability of the product, and one of them tried a user name with spaces - and got
an error message :(
I’ve a feeling that testers have given up the passion to learn something new. There are
exceptions, but the majority of testers I met here in my place are not interested in reading
blogs and writing one themselves. They are just doing testing because their employer wants
them to do it!
Lack of skilled testers. The way in which the web and technology growing is in such pace
that we really lack the efficient testers for all these.
I’m neutral about them. A certification from a local institute earned me my first job as a
Software Tester. But when I experience what real testing is, I wondered “What was that
the institute taught me?” :) Certifications are a good thing to have when you want to get the
terminology of testing right, but they are not necessarily a mandatory thing to prove that you
are good tester.
James Bach
Michael Bolton
Pradeep Soundararajan
Parimala Sanakaraiya
Darren Macmillan
India
This is a great initiative by the software testing club - this will get a lot of interesting ideas for
a cool book and an even better way to support the needy.
I love the feeling of making something better from good. I’m living a childhood dream of
becoming a super detective like Sherlock Holmes - I’m now a Software Detective :) Solving
mysteries and helping my fellow developers to fix them..
Contact Details
Email: nandagopal.r@gmail.com
Skype: nandagopal.r
Twitter: @nandagopalr
Blog: http://testingmyway.wordpress.com
Zeger Van Hese
• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing (Gerald M. Weinberg)
• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman
(Richard P. Feynman)
• Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully (Weinberg)
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Galdwell)
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing (Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord)
Keep your mind switched on. Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know or understand something, because this will lead to questioning, which in turn will improve your understanding.
Be in constant learning mode - not only testing related things, other disciplines too. As
Markus Gaertner pointed out: you’re in charge of your own career. Reach out to the testing
communicity: engage with other testers on twitter, start a blog to document your thinking.
Oh, and have fun.
Perlclip. Mindmaps. Excel. Session Tester. Scan Tool. Rapid Reporter.
Any nasty intermittent bug I was finally able to nail down. Pinpointing these bugs often
involved the use of tools to invoke instable conditions (e.g. simulating long use of an appli-
cation without shutting down, drawing some controls repeatedly), the kind of behaviour you
normally only encounter in real life user usage.
I found out the hard way that overly detailed requirement documents are not always helping
the testers. The amount of detail tends to obscure the real problem-to-be-solved in there.
Combined with a scripted testing environment, these kinds of requirements lead to an expo-
nential amount of trivial cases. I thought I covered everything, but I missed the essence. Big
learning for me there.
We need more skilled, sapient testing. Testing is a complex activity, and should be regarded as such. Not anyone can do it, you need skilled professionals. Outsourcing to cheaper
areas doesn’t do the craft justice.
I think the biggest challenge - but also the most interesting one from a tester’s point of view
- will be how to cope with the (exponentially) growing complexity that ever evolving technology will cast upon us. New technologies, new environments, new platforms, new knowl-
edge... How do we select what to test in these circumstances, given the limited time (and
budgets) we have. It’s a question of focus.
The biggest problem I have with the current certification scheme, is that nobody actually
watches anyone testing. Nobody assesses noticing/listening/talking/bug advocacy/problemsolving skills. It is mainly about memorizing definitions. The exam is trivial and easy. I’m not
against certifications per se. I’ll gladly support a certification scheme that is more thoughtout and aimed at improving the craft.
Ajay Balamuragadas - Markus Gärtner - Rikard Edgren - Michael Bolton (not exactly up and
coming, but innovative nontheless) - James Bach (idem)
Belgium
A little Something *for* testers, *by* testers, for charity? Count me in!
Because it is all about expecting the unexpected. It is challenging. And fun.
Contact Details
E-mail: zegervh@yahoo.com Twitter: @TestSideStory
Blog: http://testsidestory.wordpress.com
Stephan Kämper
• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt & David
Thomas
• Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing by William H. Press,Saul A.
Teukolsky, William T. Vetterling and Brian P. Flannery
• Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
• Introduction to Physical Oceanography by John A. Knauss
Probably *the* traditional way is of course reading books, but also user group meetings,
conferences, internet forums, katas, dojos, the software testing club, twitter, blogs… The list
seems endless.
Also try to find someone who can help you improve your skills and from whom you can
learn a lot, a master of the craft of testing (to you). Maybe (s)he sees him/herself as ‘just’
a journeyman, but that doesn’t matter. This person should offer some time to guide you to
new topics and to new ‘terrain’.
Also find someone (may be more than one person) whom you can guide and who can learn
from you.
To me there’s hardly a better way to learn than teaching. In any way, pick what appeals to
you and your way of learning.
First and foremost: My team Other than that: The internet. On a rather technical level:
About everything Ruby-related (Ruby itself, test-related libraries as Watir, Cucumber, rest-
client, irb, ri,… the list’s nearly endless), Hudson (or any other CI system), a decent text editor and a good operating system, a Wiki Oh, you said “the most valuable ‘tool’”, I’m afraid
there is not such thing (that would be a silver bullet, after all).
Impressive… there’s so many way to be ‘impressive’. One system would crash when a text
field was filled with 255 all uppercase letters ‘A’ and one ‘B’, but no other combinations
string sizes I tested.
Probably getting the design of a domain specific language wrong on the first attempt (inflexible, purely line oriented, bloated with technical details…).
To me the biggest challenge is to cover two communication gaps. One is between testers
and developers, and I think we’re on a good way to overcome this one, especially in agile
teams (It’s still a big problem in ‘traditional’ development). The other one is between ‘the
business side’ and testers (actually and more general technical people). We, the software
testing community, need to inform and educate others about our business in the terms and
language they understand.
To bridge the communication gap between cultures, time zones, industries and disciplines.
Essentially this is a generalised version of “the biggest challenge facing Testing currently”.
Currently run certifications (e.g. ISTQB) certify, well, the ability to get a certain grade in a
certification examination. It has been nicely summarised at the 2010 Agile Testing Days in
Berlin by some participants: “We are a community of professionals. We are dedicated to our
own continuing education and take responsibility for our careers. We support advancing in
learning and advancing our craft. We certify ourselves.”
Elisabeth Hendrickson - Lisa Crispin - Michael Bolton - Markus Gärtner
The software testing community is more supportive in more ways than I previously realised.
I studied physics and like running experiments to test models of reality. Software testing is a
lot like that: Empiric work, exploring, art & science in a good mix.
Contact Details
I’m @S_2K on twitter
http://zenandtheartofautomatedtesting.eu/
Aine
• Agile Testing - A practical guide for testers and agile teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory
I’m still quite new to testing and I’ve been learning a lot reading the various blogs and
tweets going on. I find it best to read a bit each day and pull something of relevance and
then try to implement the testing. See what works best and gradually add to my testing
skills that way. It’s always good to keep up to date and to take input from others, surprising
what ideas pop into your head.
Pen and paper. I scribble down notes as I go as it makes me write down what I’m doing
and I tend to do mind maps from the notes I’ve made to come up with edge cases. It’s
great to make you think.
I crashed an entire system on my first regression test as a full regression hadn’t been done
in months! No communication was working between servers and device. The application
stopped running and the server itself eventually over heated and we had to cool it down to
clear the issues!
I haven’t made mistakes as such, I’ve just missed some small bits and pieces. I try not to
think of myself making mistakes as it shakes my confidence and then I am not happy with
the testing I’ve carried out and can get stuck in a testing loop. I just know there will be bits
missed so I will try and cover as much as humanly possible and then relax.
I’ve recently been hired as a tester with no tester certification. I’ve an IT background and
relevant experience. I would not take a certification if it did not increase my knowledge, I’m
not willing to pay someone to tell me something I know. Certification has never appeared
when applying for jobs.
England
I get paid to break software and have someone else fix it! I used to be a programmer so
it’s nice from the other side. Also each day is different and I’m always learning. You never
know what you might break!
John Stevenson
• The Art of Software Testing - Glenford J. Myers
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design - Lee Copeland
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams - Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory
• Blink: The Power of Thinking without thinking - Malcolm Gladwell
If you wish to count yourself as a professional tester then you really should think about getting involved in the testing community, making a contribution. – you can learn so much and
also people can learn from you. People may not agree with your views and opinions but
they are YOUR views and at least you get to express them – others may learn from them
and you may learn from others. There are various options to get involved, blogs, twitter,
magazine, user groups, conferences. To quote: It’s what you learn after you know it all that
counts :- Harry S Truman Always remember to keep learning.
The most valuable tool I use to aid my testing is my brain!!
Since I have an interest in photography the most interesting bug I have ever found was a
huge red ant nest in the woods near where I live - it was one of the largest I had ever seen
and full of ants - so I guess that would make it lots of bugs!!!! In a professional testing role
the most impressive bug I found was one in which it would only occur after the system
had been running for at least 1 year (24x7) - it would then start to remove the first entries
entered - very impressive since the first entries were the configuration options for the entire
system
On a linux system issuing a rm -rf command when logged in as root at the root directory.
The biggest challenge to keep everyone working together to push testing forward as a
profession.
Over the next cpl of years the amount of information being driven by the testing community
could reach overload and cause people to become disconnected and lose interest. There
is a challenge to ensure that testing as a profession remains in the spotlite at schools and
universities - the message needs to be spread to those who have the ability to challenge
the status quo.
Certification can be ok for those starting out in testing as a way to learn the basic skills.
The problem comes when it is used as a money making scheme and forced on to people
who have many years of epxerience by means of filtering job applications.
• Michael Bolton
• Tony Bruce
• Ajay Balamurugadas
• Santhosh Tuppad
• Matt Heusser
England
Software testing is great because it incorporates aspects of problem solving, thinking, psy-
chology, riddles, challenges and most of all it has the software testing club a great place for
those who love testing
Contact Details
twitter: @steveo1967
blog: http://steveo1967.blogspot.com/
Dawn Cannan
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory
• Agile Software Development with Scrum (Series in Agile Software Development) by Ken
Schwaber and Mike Beedle
• Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg
I keep my testing skills sharp by “practicing” in everyday life. It’s easy for me, partly because
I am one of those people who notices issues *everywhere*, and I also seem to attract them.
I have alwyas noticed continuity issues in movies, and misspellings on billboards. As I ex-
perience the web every day outside of my day job, I take the time to explore and experiment
with web sites. I ask myself questions like “What would happen if I pressed this button
before I have finished filling out the form?”, “What does that error message mean, exactly?”,
and “As a user, was that explanation of the workslow what I expexted it to be? If not, what
*did* I expect it to be?” This helps me collect data points for where issues are common,
and deepen my understanding for what I expect as a user.
FireBug. FireBug is a great all-around tool for both exploring and automating. I can use
it to better understand what I am seeing, or not seeing, on a web page, and for identifying
objects. I can execute javascript to investigate how a site will respond to specific events.
What does “impressive” mean? I can think of lots that were “impressive” in that it actually
made it out of an intelligent human being’s head and through the keyboard :) The bug I
describe most often turned out to not be an issue with my team’s application code at all, but
was impressive in its impact. We had a Java client/server app, and with some frequency,
when simply moving the window on the screen, our client’s entire computer would imme-
diately reboot. No stop gaps, no “Do you want to shut down?”, just turn right off and then
start up fresh again. It turned out to be a nasty incompatibility with a specific version of
Java and a specific version of the video card driver that of course, this large company had
in every single one of its computers. It tooks us weeks of repetitive troubleshooting to find
and work around it.
In hindsight, it would be thinking that I was a “gatekeeper”. In my early jobs, I saw myself
as the “QA Queen”, and my team, the gate through which all releases must pass. We did
much stereotypical waterfall-type testing, with a few weeks at the end of months of development to run through massive amounts of test cases on dozens of configurations. Because
of well-known business constraints, I often had to pick my “top 10” bugs to be fixed, while
all of the others often remained in existence. I’ve learned over the years just how much being a gatekeeper is a fallicy and does not actually help us to release high quality software.
I have learned the benefit of really including testing early and often and bulding in quality
from the start, as a whole team.
I don’t know that I can speak for all of testing. I can only speak for what I see in my experience and what I hear about in the community. I feel that there is a (potentially) growing
chasm between “traditional testers” and “technical testers”. It seems that as many testers
are becoming more technical, many others are refusing to go near anything that looks technical. I worry that we have the potential of losing many great analytical minds in the testing
world due to a desire to test but not code. There are efforts to “bridge the gap” between the
technical and non-technical, but my hope is that all will continue to be welcome in the testing world, and the value of all types of testing skills will be obvious.
Agile has hit mainstream -- or so I hear. My personal experience still shows a lot of companies set in their ways, but the trends show Agile gaining strength. Many, many companies
that are moving in this direction may be doing well on new work, but what is happening with
the legacy applications? I feel like there will be, for a period of time, a divide between maintenance applications and new applications. As testers learn more efficient ways of testing,
and how the fun in testing can return once the boring stuff is covered with automation, they
will still be burdened with legacy applications that are difficult or impossible to automate
against. Many of these applications are years or decades of codebases, by multiple developers -- they are cryptic, difficult to work with bowls of spaghetti code. They will hang on
for dear life for years as teams and people move on to cleaner applications. Who will still
maintain these legacy systems? Who will spend long hours struggling with a beast whose
creators aren’t even around any more, when no developer even wants to touch them?
It makes me chuckle that the questions refers to them as “schemes”? Like pyramid
schemes :) I personally believe that while certification training may be a good way to
introduce new testers to the terminologies, strategies, and techniques of software testing,
posession of the piece of paper says absolutely nothing about how good of a tester you
are. A short story: A few years back, I acquired an electrical contractor license for a friend’s
business. I took a 2-day class, and then aced the multiple choice test that followed. That’s
all it took. I am now a licensed electrical contractor. However, I never once during those
2 days touched a wire or breaker or voltmeter. If you were to put me into a house having
electrical problems, I am no more qualified to troubleshoot it than the next guy (er, girl). I
have no problem with certifications schemes. I just don’t believe they are being used correctly by hirers.
Markus Gaertner - Catherine Powell - Chris McMahon - Paul Carvalho - Mark Vasko
As testers, it is often our responsibility to make sure that the “right thing” is visible, understood, and done. Many of us have seen the perils of doing the “easy thing” or the “this
benefits me greatly, screw everyone else” thing. Testers often make difficult decisions in
order to support the greater good (not to the exclusion of other roles who also do this!).
The message from Oxfam is one of protecting global values -- basic rights for every single
human being on earth. Oxfam is also fighting for the greater good, rather than any specific
group or subset of individuals. I am happy to support this cause, both through donation and
my time and contribution to this eBook.
I accidentally fell into software testing. At the time (don’t shoot me), I thought it was a good
stepping stone to becoming a developer. Little did I know, when I finally jumped into the
development profession, I would hate it. Software testing speaks to me. It comes naturally
to me. I am a bug magnet -- at work, home, on the road, everywhere. I enjoy feeling out
the limits and experimenting. I also enjoy troubleshooting, using my experience and lots of
“gut feel” to find the root cause of a problem. Testing gives me the ability to never be bored
with my job. I can write code, I can poke at software, I can write documentation, I can sit
with developers, operations teams, customers, customer service, just about *any* role and
explore their needs.
Contact Details
passionatetester.com dcannan@gmail.com @dckismet -- Twitter/Skype
Jim Hazen
• Testing Computer Software, Cem Kaner et al.
• How to Break Software, James Whittaker
• Managing the Testing Process, Rex Black
• Software Engineering Economics, Barry Boehm
• Software Metrics, Robert Grady and Deborah Caswell
Keep working at it. This line of work requires constant learning and refinement of knowl-
edge. Don’t get stuck in a rut and look for new ways of doing things. Do your research, and
do it exhaustively to find your answers. Someone else may have already come up with the
solution or a similar one to what you need. Don’t re-invent the wheel if you don’t have to.
Learn to adapt things to your needs and be willing to adapt yourself. Also, sharpen up your
communication skills. If you cannot convey your message/information in written and verbal
formats effectively then you are in deep trouble. Become a good listener and dig for the
information. Don’t be afraid or intimidated by other people or groups. You are doing your
job to help them and the company produce a product. Be active in that. As part of the communication skills learn to ‘sell’ your information and ‘sell testing’ to get buy-in for your work.
Use the skills of selling to get what you need to do your job effectively.
My brain. It is still the best ‘computer’ available to me. Think about what you are doing and
why, and just don’t do things by wrote.
I’ve had a few during my career, so no single one really stands out. Let’s just say I’ve found
some doosies in my time.
Working 36 hours straight without sleep trying to finish testing and make the release/pro-
duction date. And this was after working 8 weeks straight putting in 60-70 hour weeks. Because I was tired I missed a last minute change and bug in the application, and when it got
out in the real world it caused the application to corrupt data. Thus we didn’t have a lot of
happy customers on our hands, the press ate us alive for it, and management was breathing down my neck asking why this was missed.
The lesson I learned is that you cannot
kamikaze yourself and at the same time be effective in your job. Working insane hours will
only lead to mistakes and defects escaping to the wild. I didn’t push back on the deadline
and say we needed a few more days to finish. I put a big ‘S’ on my chest thinking I was
Superman when in reality it only stood for ‘Stupid man’. It’s a mistake I have not repeated
the rest of my career.
Commoditization. There has always been a mindset that Testing is not a ‘skilled’ profession
(or a profession at all), and that anyone can do it. This has become worse with outsourc-
ing and off shoring of the work. There are too many people using it as a way to ‘get in’, and
companies (both client and provider) that see it as a job that doesn’t need the same skills
and calibre of people as development.
The fact is you need people that are highly skilled
and experienced to do the job effectively, and economically.
Same as the previous one. Plus the increased emphasis on test automation. Test Automation can mean many things such as Unit Testing, process automation for test & defect management, Functional testing of an application, Performance/Load testing, and other parts of
the testing process that can be ‘automated’. The problem being is that there are people and
companies getting into this and they don’t understand the basic problems to be solved and
the ways to properly implement solutions. There will be a surge of ‘Automagic’ that will fail
and cause credibility problems for the process & tools for automation and the people who
really do know what they are doing. Expectations of what ‘test automation’ is and what can
done with it need to be properly set and managed.
When the first ones came out years and years ago (like QAI CQA & CSTE, and ASQ
CSQE) I thought they were good. They required multiple classes and the process was peti-
tion based (peer review). They were tough to get. Nowadays I think they are a joke and are
causing damage to the credibility of the profession. It is way too easy to get ‘certified’ be-
cause of the short classes and exam-based systems. Some of the certification groups have
become paper mills and are purely profit motivated. Today the saying “Certified doesn’t
mean Qualified” is very Germaine to the discussion.
• Scott Barber
• Igor Gershovich
• Justin Hunter
• Matt Heusser
• Joe Strazzere
USA
I’ve always been good at breaking stuff. It plays to my natural curiosity of why and how
things work. Also, I’ve made a good career out of it and hope to continue to. I like working
with the group to bring a product to market or a system online for the end-users.
Contact Details
Jim Hazen http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jim-hazen/0/b48/760
William Gentry
• Managing the Testing Process Rex Black
• Critical Testing Processes Rex Black
• Managing the Test People Judith McKay
• Systematic Software Testing Craig & Jaskiel
I am a Rex Black disciple, so I highly recommend his books. I also highly recommend
ISTQB certification, especially courses offered by Rex Black Consulting Inc. The RBCI
website also has a plethora of articles, templates, podcasts and webinar recordings that are
extremely useful. Practice a lot. If you don’t have a testing job, find software makers who
need beta testers and work out a partnership with them. Also, look to the various freelance
sites for testing jobs. They probably won’t pay much but you’ll make up for it later with the
experience you gain.
A good understanding of the entire test process. Knowing the process can make up for
all of the tools people think you need to manage it. If you don’t know the process the tools
won’t help you a bit. You can manage the process with basic office software.
An incorrect payout in slot machine software. The code delineating the boundaries for
increasing payouts and subsequently lower probability were overlapping causing the slot
machine to payout 1000 credits too often, cheating the casino. In addition to discovering the
defect, I was able to pinpoint the error in the code to the programmer. Probably not my most
impressive discovery, but it ‘s one that’s stuck in my mind for years.
Calling a programmer’s code “junk.” Don’t ever do that. It only serves to start an adversarial
relationship and create barriers. Once done, it’s hard to repair the relationship and break
down barriers.
I feel that the biggest challenge has been, is and will continue to be justifying the need for
testing. That’s not to say that it can’t be done, just that testers don’t focus on it enough and
don’t know how to do it well.
Aside from justifying the need for testing, I think the biggest challenge over the next few
years is adjusting test processes to ever changing software development lifecycles, especially when more than one is used within the same company.
I’m pro certification and partial to the certifications and training offered by the ISTQB. That’s
not to say that other certification programs aren’t good or don’t offer satisfactory training,
just that ISTQB fulfils my needs.
• Rex Black
• Randy Rice
• Rick Craig
USA
I support just about anything that helps out those less fortunate than me or looks find cures
for currently incurable diseases.
It’s the challenge of building great software for customers that drives my enjoyment for software testing. I also thoroughly enjoy building and improving the test process.
Contact Details
Email: bill.gentry@looksharpdesigns.com Skype: looksharpdesigns
Twitter: @looksharpdesign
Web: http://looksharpdesigns.com
Shilpa
Who moved my cheese? Spencer Johnson
Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement William E Lewis
Information Dashboard Design Stephen Few
A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design Lee Copeland
How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Testing W/CD James A Whittaker
They have to learn from making mistakes. They can mistakes only if they take risk. Risk in
doing things they have never done, risk for innovation. Also they should not get into the trap
of “we always did it this way”. This wont take you far in the testing world.
A big picture of all the moving elements. Each project I work on is a big puzzle. I put the
pieces together to solve it. Requirements are a piece, the actual application or product is a
piece, my tests are a piece, etc. I put these together and try to make the picture of what is it
that I am trying to solve and attack is slowly.
The URL for our application was storing login and password. So once you login to the appli-
cation and you move from screen to screen you could see login and password information. I
just about fell off my chair seeing my secret password on my screen.
Making assumptions and not testing them. I sometimes make an assumption and assume
its right it can be a requirement or a test step. Sometimes I get so caught up with my application I forget to question it.
CLOUD - with cloud development there will be more and more user (customers) who are
unique and have environments that will be hard to replicate. They will each have environments that will be unique and testing those combinations and predicting everything and
anything they can do in the cloud will be hard to test or be proactive about. We will have to
rely on automation a lot. Also virtualization will be another solution to create these environments on the go.
Cloud will continue to be a big problem for testing.
I am torn between yes we need some type of certification so we all at least speak same or
similar language. But with so many organizations having their own certification programs
who decides which one is better or greater? You can be an excellent tester and not need
any certification at all.
USA
This is where my strength lies.
Contact Details
Email: shillu13@gmail.com
Twitter: @shillu13
Web: http://todaysbigpicture.blogspot.com/
Jared Richardson
• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
• Learn to Program by Chris Pine
• Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt
• Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
By learning a lightweight scripting language, like Ruby, that can drive a variety of tools. The
Ruby language in particular has a very rich testing culture, so there are many, many tools
that you can use to test Java or dotNet apps (or other languages). It’s said you can’t think
in a language you can’t speak. The same is true of test scripting. Learn a language like
Ruby (I love http://rubykoans.com) as a starting place. It walks you through the language
~and~ great testing practices. Then pair with your developers anytime you or they write a
test. You may not be fluent in the developer’s language, but you’ll help them at richness to
their unit tests by suggesting different data sets to test with. Knowing a scripting language
(like Ruby) will provide you with the basic vocabulary to communicate with the team.
For me it’s a light-weight testing framework (like Junit, Nunit, Gtest, CPPUnit, etc) instead
of a home grown test framework or a very expensive tool. Start with a very light framework,
use it for more than unit testing (package level, integration, etc), then run those tests in a
continuous integration tool. Cruise Control is my favourite, but Hudson is another popular
one. Continuous integration provides ongoing test execution, and feedback to the developers (as well as to testers), and it frees you up to do more interesting work while the CI
machine does the “Hello world” testing.
A developer wrote code that knew the order of the fields in the database tables. When the
order changed, it broke an admin GUI in the client. We didn’t see it for nearly 6 weeks, then
it took several more weeks to understand that simply recreating the database tables (and
not any code change) has caused the problem. Several programming principles, like keeping your code modular and not letting other systems see your code’s internal implementa-
tion, were not just broken. They were beaten to within an inch of their life!
When I was younger I would often say “Yes, that was a bug, but it’s working now. Let’s
move on.” After several high-profile, and very embarrassing situations, I learned that a bug
should never be allowed to hide. If it happened once, it’ll happen again. Never let something slide just because it’s not easy to reproduce. Bulldog it until you know why it hap-
pened, then fix it (or at the very least, document it). Otherwise that bug will come back at
the worst possible time.
A lack of automation and formality in testing. Too many developers (and testers) have their
own hand-rolled tests. These tests are difficult to share and automate. Once these tests
are written, they must be run in a continuous integration system that looks similar to the
production environment. As an industry we must embrace the discipline of test automation.
At a minimum we need a “Hello World” test on everything we write. When a bug occurs,
we need a “Defect Driven Test” to cover that bug. All work needs to be covered. this proves
that the code works and moves us past the “It worked on my machine” mentality that’s so
prevalent today. This test creation is just as much a responsibility of developers as it is tes-
ters, but we’ve all got to work together to make this happen. We’ve got to stop blaming “The
Others” and realize we’re on a team and can get so much more done if we work together. If
you can’t code, then use code coverage tools (like http://cobertura.sourceforge.net ) to just
measure what the developers are (or aren’t) doing. Motivate your team using peer pressure.
A hardware vendor would never provide a motherboard or cable that might work. They have
rigorous tests that they won’t skimp on before delivery. We need that same mindset in testing. It’s not something that can be skimped or minimized. No one remembers when you
ship early or even on time. They only remember that your product crashed or returned bad
data. Take your time and do it right the first time, or don’t be surprised when your department is downsized or outsourced.
• Dawn Cannan
• Janet Gregory
• Lisa Crispin
• Elisabeth Hendrickson
• Doug Bradbury
I’d come back to test automation. It’s a discipline that must be embraced by testers, developers,
and even managers. And customers! If you send a project to a third party (inside or outside of
your company), make a test suite part of the deliverables. Write tests up front so they know when
the product does what you want it to do. Test automation, with a great continuous integration
tool, is the number one problem I see on teams everywhere I work and speak. Learning technol-
ogy? Easy. New languages? Operating systems? Trivial. Testing frameworks? Done by lunch. But
the hard, ongoing discipline of solid software engineering, especially test automation, is difficult to
maintain. As testers, we can ensure this subject stays in the forefront of any product discussion.
Schemes... do we have any biases in the way the question is phrased? :) Certifications are a
great way to get basic exposure to a topic. They bring in an expert (I hope!) that you can ask
more questions and learn what areas your team needs to learn more about. The problem with
certifications is when HR or management assume getting a certification means you’re now an
expert. That’s just never the case. Even with an detailed and in-depth certification, you’re get-
ting “book learning” (usually). Much like your college degree, it’s very useful information, but it’s
dwarfed by real world experience. I strongly encourage any organization spending budget on
certifications to spend half their certification budget on a mentoring program. Bring in an expert
to work with a team for a few weeks or months. Let them work right alongside the team, solv-
ing problems and providing insight on a day-to-day basis. Most great consultants I know would
welcome this type of “long” term engagement and provide a nice price break to get a longer than
normal team engagement.
This is a great model. It provides (hopefully) some great insights and sound bites that can help
people learn and improve their day-to-day work, while providing help to people who need so
much more than we do. If my submissions make it in, I’ll be honoured to have played a small part.
Great testing makes software fun for the entire team. No one wants to work late or on weekends
when the entire team is stressed out. No one wants to have management pushing everyone hard
to get things done. But we do want to create and ship great products. And a great automation
suite, along with continuous integration, provides a solid foundation that we can build great products on. Software testing tells me that things really work.
Contact Details
I can be found via my web site, http://AgileArtisans.com or via jared@agileartisans.com
Torsten J. Zelger
• Beautiful Testing - Tim Riley & Adam Goucher
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing - Kaner / Bach / Pettichord
• How to Break Series - James A. Whittaker
• Exploratory Software Testing - James A. Whittaker
• Software Test Automation - Fewster & Graham
Read books, magazines and join a testing community like this one. This is worth much
more than any Testing Certificate can give you.
We always had a combination of home-brew developed tools, open-source and professional tools each to fit its best purpose rather than going for ONE expensive tool, which despite
its price could never fulfil all our requirements.
One of the most impressive experience for me to learn is that executing the same test case
a second time, or at a different time or in a different playback order can mean to get different results. Such issues are often ignored because they may not be reproducible at first
sight, but if you manage to demonstrate the steps to reproduce such hard to find bugs, then
you will earn some more respect for your work.
Trying to please your boss and accept his demand for making a release-recommendation
statement. If you as a tester and/or test manager are the only person who has to judge over
Go or No-Go, then you will probably be the only person blamed for either delaying a release
or getting held responsible for a bug that slipped through. The best approach I have expe-
rienced was at a company where the complete team, BA, DEV and Testing was involved in
the decision.
Being able to keep up with the incredible speed our company deploys / ships new soft-
ware features. Along with the increasing number of features, also the number test cases are
increasing. Each new test case asks for maintenance sooner or later, no matter whether it
is automated or not and it is an extra challenge to keep it all running and making sure the
scripts will still test the right thing after software has changed or after users run different usecases.
To convince upper management to either slow down the release cycles or to hire more testers and test automation engineers.
Test Certificates do not teach testers how to test. A tester earns my full respect if she makes
notes of bugs she missed in the past and uses her notes as a guideline or plan for future
tests.
James A. Whittaker - Dorothy Graham - Linda Wilkinson - Michael Bolton -James McCaffrey
Switzerland
It is a great idea to hand out such an eBook. Newbies can get an impression of what it means
to test software and professionals get evidence that they are not alone out there and maybe
one or the other hint will lead to try out new things.
I love to write code but not all day long. I love to break software, but not all day long. So
I chose to become a test automation engineer, after I have written code, and after I have
tested software manually. Now I can do a little bit of everything without getting bored. And
besides, I love software that works, so why not use my skills to help make it better.
Contact Details
Email: torsten.zelger@scionlabs.com
Web: www.zelger.org (my cartoons about software testing)
Alan Richardson
• Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson
• The Art of War, Sun Tzu
• The book of five rings, Miyamoto Musashi
• Diagnosing the System for Organizations, Stafford Beer
• Provocative Therapy, Frank Farrelly
• Continually, and deliberately, practice testing software.
• Keep logs of your testing.
• Learn how to hack
• Get more technical
Systems Thinking
Gaining access to all the customer details of a publicly accessible social networking site via
their ring fenced beta testing environment, and subsequently being able to login as some of
them. The Fiddler web proxy was a tremendous help in doing this.
Complacency and forgetting to maintain a level of paranoia about coverage
Testers remaining relevant in the software development process.
Spotting the difference between a tester and a developer.
You’re better off becoming an ordained minister from the Church of Subgenius for only
$30.00 than putting any money, or time, towards the Testing Certification Scam. (That didn’t
come across too strong did it? I tried to tone it down for the children in the audience.)
I’m not really a people person so I assume everyone is splendid.
England
I hope this book doesn’t suck cause the charity deserves better than that. Oh God, I hope
my bits weren’t the sucky bits.
I don’t love it. I’m addicted. I wish there was some sort of cure. Seriously, if there was a
pill I could take to just ease up, and not test stuff, I’d take it. What’s to love? Learning new
skills all the time? Continually expanding my technical knowledge and staying up to date?
Constantly on the look out for new tools to increase my visibility into, or control over, the
system? Finding faults and problems? Continually improving my abilities? Who could love
any of that? Not me.
Contact Details
Visit www.eviltester.com and leave a comment, you know you want to.
Trish Khoo
• Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar by James Bach
Seek out new knowledge. Read. Learn. Talk to other testers. Try new things. Start a blog.
Other testers and developers.
I once found a bug that triggered a cycle of about 300 continuous silent errors over a set
amount of time. Each time an error occurred, the customer would be charged a small fee.
This created the effect of money seemingly disappearing before the customer’s eyes for no
apparent reason. Luckily it didn’t make it into production.
When managers asked for misleading metrics, I used to give them what they asked for. I
don’t do that anymore.
General lack of education about testing within the testing industry, and the IT industry as a
whole.
As software approaches evolve, it will be interesting to see how testers’ roles adapt to fit
these new approaches.
I don’t think any of the current Testing Certification schemes are sophisticated enough to
provide valuable information to employers about testers’ skills. Smart employers will realize
this.
• Michael Bolton
• Marlena Compton
• Rob Lambert
• James Martin
• Markus Gärtner
Australia
I love this idea. I’m always so impressed by the work done by the STC, especially by Rosie
Sherry and Rob Lambert who devote so much of their time to building a community for us.
Because there’s always something new to learn.
Markus Gärtner
• Quality Software Management Vol 1-4 by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can
Lead to a Lifetime of Success by James Bach
• Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt
A balanced-mix: theoretical knowledge acquired through blogs, articles, and books, applying the theoretical directly in praxis at work, in Testing Dojos, during Weekend Testing, or
by learning through Testing Challenges, and finally helping other testers grow by exposing
them to similar challenges you have been through.
My brain
if (isLogDebugOn()) {
correctProductionBehavior();
Log.message(“”);
}
That surely was interesting to see. “Can you provide me with debug log files?” “Sure, oh,
the bug disappeared, never mind.” Next day it popped up again.
Premature judgement
Programmers and project responsible being completely careless about it, and ignoring the
feedback proper and valuable testing can provide to them.
Finding the transition from legacy certification models to a model of testing which actually
brings value to project stakeholders.
Certification is the devil in disguise. Just like the medieval triumvirate of army, church, and
government formed an evil axis, Certification-Institutes, certification course sellers, and
HR-departments create machinery which blends executives from proper action, meaningful
leadership, and advancement in the craft.
• James Bach
• Cem Kaner
• Elisabeth Hendrickson
• Matt Heusser
• Gojko Adzic
Germany
Any money which went into this eBook did not go into any certification program. This is
something to celebrate.
I am a natural-born tester, incorporating one or more of the tester types when the situation
calls for it. Software Testing is my destiny.
Contact Details
markus.gaertner@it-agile.de
@mgaertne
http://linkedin.com/in/mgaertne
http://www.shino.de/blog
Steve Green
• Testing Computer Software: Kaner, Falk & Nguyen
• How to Break Software: James Whittaker
• How to Break Web Software: Andrews & Whittaker
Continuous learning and practice is essential. Read as much as you can, especially on top-
ics that do not appear to be closely related to your immediate tasks - you can often gain un-
expected insights, and a breadth of learning prepares you for the future. Always be thinking
about what you are doing and how it can be done better or more efficiently. Always question
your assumptions and those of other people. Participate in community activities such as
online discussion groups, Weekend Testers and offline events such as Zappers.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth - it’s ‘only’ a link checker but it tells us so much more about the website
we’re testing than just the broken links. It gives us numerous inventories such as file types,
external links, subdomains, email addresses so we rapidly get an overview of the website’s
structure and technologies - it’s a vital tool in our test planning. Fiddler 2 is extremely useful and we make extensive use of spreadsheets for all manner of purposes.
We tested a range of Java and Flash-based casino applications where we were able to win
unlimited amounts of money on several games. It involved identifying and linking together a
variety of flaws such as bypassing the maximum stake limit and finding ways to either win
or break even but not lose. We took delight in submitting screenshots showing our multimillion pound account balance when the maximum stake was only £10. The techniques
involved interception of HTTP traffic to determine how the application worked, identifying
‘windows of opportunity’ when it is possible to perform actions that should not be possible,
and interacting with the application in ways that had not been anticipated, such as by keyboard navigation or programmatically.
It’s got to be when I spent several days testing the wrong website. The client had told us the
URL had changed part-way through a project but I somehow forgot. Apart from that, most
of my mistakes arise from false assumptions such as two or more things being equivalent
when they actually aren’t, or something being unimportant when it’s actually crucial.
The almost total absence of good training in testing and test management. The approach
and techniques being taught are woefully inadequate - they never worked even when soft-
ware was a whole lot simpler than it is now. The focus on process rather than skill is totally
misguided and puts testers in completely the wrong mindset for doing effective, efficient
testing. It limits their thinking and actually inhibits their progression.
The increasing complexity of real-time interconnected systems, some of which we will have
no control over and little or no knowledge of because they don’t belong to us. It may be impossible to put the system into a known state or return it to a previous state, and it may not
even be possible to know the expected outcome of a test.
My views on certification are mostly unprintable, but I am willing to publicly say that I
consider all the current schemes to be a scam. Unsurprisingly, the schemes work on the
cookie-cutter method of teaching material that is easy to teach rather than teaching what
people need to know. The examinations prove nothing at all - I know many recruiters and
marketers who are certified but I wouldn’t let them anywhere near a testing project. Worse
still, the system feeds itself - some of the certified testers become consultants who start
selling more certification courses and some become test managers and insist that all their
testers must also be certified. We neither ask nor care whether job applicants are certified.
If I had a preference it would probably be to recruit experienced people who are not certi-
fied - if they have the confidence to refuse to get certified and still make a living (as I have
done), they are probably better than your average tester.
• Alan Richardson
• James Lyndsay
• James Bach
• Michael Bolton
• James Whittaker
England
All our lives we’ve been told off for breaking things. Now I get paid to do it.
Contact Details
steve.green@testpartners.co.uk
http://www.testpartners.co.uk
Kandan Muthu
Thinking outside-the-box often leaves a lot of dirt (n bugs) inside. And this dirt cannot be
flushed-out unless one looks at the whole product - understand: (a) why a particular feature
is needed, (b) why is it implemented that way and (c) its links across features. When deal-
ing with the above, it opens up a plethora of learning and ideas. Also there is a tendency to
compare apples to oranges (typically from customer/ marketing), which sometimes translate
into features/ designs that makes little sense to the product functionality. It maybe essential
for a test engineer to draw comparison/ inspiration, but very important to know where to
draw a line. If I have to test a module I’ve tested very often, unless I look at different per-
spectives and employ different techniques, the boring work will kill my skill. And more-oftenthan-not, exploratory testing without purpose kills its essence.
No single tool has been my guard, but Unix based scripting helped(helps) me often.
A service package module was designed, with no insight on how the packages were drawnup for Triple-Play.
Being complacent testing the same feature over and again; and overlooking certain simple
issues.
A number of experienced testers soon become managers and move-on, even 10% of their
experience isn’t passed-on.
Good to Understand, Great to Use; (unfortunately) Badly understood and Implemented.
• Rekha Poosala
• Karthik Natarajan
India
Surprising and Impressive.
It introduced, made and still makes me, what I am in the Industry.
Contact Details
kmuthu@mschumacher.com
Ethel Evans
Testing Computer Software by Cem Kaner
Don’t be afraid to switch jobs frequently in your early career. You will gain a greater variety
of skills faster, plus get a clearer picture of what you are looking for in your career. Once
you figure out what you love to do and are good at, then you can start specializing.
When interviewing, try to figure out what you will learn from this job. Ideally, there will be at
least one thing you will need to do that you’ve never done before. You should be familiar
with (very roughly) 80% of the skills, and eager to learn 20%. Scale this according to how
busy your non-career life is, of course - but there should always be something new for you.
Once you find a good position to stick with, you need to be more active about managing
your career in such a way that you are always growing, while still meeting your employer’s
needs. At any time, you should be able to answer the question, “What skills am I learning
or advancing currently?” If you don’t know of anything to learn that would help you with
your job, you are probably out-of-date - so you should then work on catching up with the
latest-and-greatest in your area.
During my first interview straight out of college for a contract position at Microsoft, I was
pointed at a computer and asked to test the Windows calendar in XP. I was given two minutes. I immediately started playing with the dates, trying to see what the behaviour was if I
set the date to the far future (I had recently read Cem Kaner’s “Testing Computer Software”
book, and boundary testing was fresh in my mind). I actually managed to crash Outlook. I
didn’t get to look into the bug, since it was an interview and wasn’t related to the team I was
working on, but I learned later that playing with the calendar dates really fast caused some
bad behaviour with the meetings scheduled in Outlook. I think that was when I first realized
that I might actually have a knack for this “testing” thing.
Doing what my boss told me without question, during my early career. Most of my family
works in “blue-collar” jobs, where you do what you are told without worrying about if it is the
right thing or not. Software doesn’t work that way. In software, employees are often more
up-to-date than their bosses, at least in their specific project, and often have more time to
think about the “right” way to do things. Failing to question your boss’ decisions or to offer
up ideas about how to improve is seen as a lack of intelligence, initiative, skill - a lack of
something key to being a valuable team member. This is doubly important in test, where
the entire role is about “pushing back”. If you don’t question your boss correctly (assuming
a technically apt boss), how does your boss know you are questioning the developer’s code
or the product’s quality and testing decisions adequately? Test everything, even your boss’
ideas. Of course, be tactful as well.
I think testing is transitioning from defining itself as a field to determining what makes a
“good” tester. This is key for opening up educational opportunities. For example, what do
courses on software testing look like? What do they cover? Are they their own degrees, or
are they focuses and specialties of software development? Do testers even need degrees,
or are certificates and experience sufficient (or even superior)? At what level?
I think the shifting nature of test and the change in desired test skill sets is going to be
stressful for a few more years, at least.
Around here (Seattle, Washington, USA), I’m seeing a strong shift from manual testing
or testers who can script a little to testers with a full developer skill set (SDETs, Software
Development Engineer in Test). Manual testers with little or no ability to code, on the other
hand, are losing their jobs, and aren’t being hired into new jobs very quickly. This is also
happening as there are many developers out of work due to the recession who are more
likely to be willing to move into a test position, causing the shift to happen more rapidly.
Testers without coding skills are left with three choices that I can see: 1) Pick up coding
skills, and aim for an SDET role. 2) Differentiate themselves by becoming a truly excellent
manual tester, and become skilled at marketing the value of manual exploratory testing. 3)
Move - either into a different field, or into a part of the world that hasn’t gone through this
shift yet. Unfortunately, option #3 may become less and less common if the SDET role continues to become more popular.
I think the testing community needs to start addressing this issue, and figuring out what
roads are available for manual testers to transition into roles 1 or 2. We need to market the
value of expert exploratory testers who focus solely on superb manual testing and not on
automation or automated test design (I think every team of 3+ testers should have at least
one dedicated expert manual tester), and we need to help those who would rather join the
ranks of the coders (which will probably be less competitive for a while due to greater de-
mand relative to the available pool of skilled testers) figure out how to get the skills they will
need to compete as developers in test.
Of course, this is a world where many software teams still try to get by with little or no testing at all for the first year or so of production. So you have teams which don’t hire manual
testers because they don’t have *any* testers, and teams which don’t hire dedicated manual
testers because they think a good SDET can handle both roles. So manual testers are being squeezed at both ends of the spectrum.
I’m not really familiar with testing certificates. I have a developer background, with a degree
in Computer Science. In general, coding experience and degrees - credentials as a de-
veloper - will get you a lot further in a testing career than testing certifications, at least in
this area. I think certifications might be more useful at the lower end of the pay scale, for
someone breaking into the area; or for other geographic areas, where employers might not
be as tech savvy. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, at least around here, a person might
get further by listing just the good books on testing that they’ve read.
I’m also not sure I’m
confident that software testing is mature enough for a clearly defined, stable set of skills
and best practices to exist. I personally would be concerned about testing certificate exams
being out-of-date by the time they were published.
Lisa Crispin
USA
This book is a great idea. Thank you to the group of testers who came up with this creative
approach to both fundraising for charity and promoting the software test community.
Originally, I didn’t love software testing. The accurate description would be that I saw lots
of people looking for software testers with a computer science background, and I was will-
ing to give it a try. For four years, I wasn’t sure if I would stick with it. What finally sold me
was when, during the recession, I was able to find work rapidly. That was when I realized
that being a skilled tester made me a critical, highly sought-after member of the develop-
ment team. This meant that I could choose “good” jobs - which for me means challenging
work with great people that also provides the flexibility and respect for my personal life that I
need as a mother of three and the sole income for my family.
I also knew by that point that
testing didn’t mean giving up coding. I love to write code, and will actually develop “cravings” for coding if I don’t get enough time to write code on the job. However, testing is a
fast-paced world that, like software development itself, changes quickly. There are always
new tools, new software needs for testers - and a niche for testers who can develop to write
code on the job. Not having to lose my identity as a coder in order to also be a tester was
a big deal for me. Being unique among developers (by specializing in test) also meant that
I had a lot to offer: The unique perspective a tester brings to the table, combined with an
understanding of what good development is from a developer’s perspective. I guess what I
ultimately fell in love with was being a unique but necessary part of a software team. I love
coming at problems from a different direction than everyone else in the room: Every other
person in team meetings is trying to make the product work. I’m trying to figure out why the
product (as designed or developed) won’t work.
Contact Details
ethele@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ethelevans
Rikard Edgren
• The Ongoing Revolution in Software Testing by Cem Kaner
• Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift til de philosophiske Smuler by Sören Kierkegaard
• Lateral Thinking - Creativity Step by Step by Edward deBono
• Testing Computer Software by Kaner, Falk, Nguyen
• Exploratory Testing Dynamics by Bach, Bach, Bolton
||: read, practice on your own, discuss with others, practice together, think for yourself :||
My mind, and my colleague’s.
It was found by a colleague, but I saw it. A (not released) tool that cleaned its Windows
registry entries, but unfortunately started from the registry root making the computer unbootable.
Testing and reporting a lot of details that weren’t sought for, making an overwhelming impression, and no impact.
Getting more skilled testers.
We need to communicate to the young ones that software testing needs them, and that it’s
a good profession.
In the Advanced Syllabus there is an appendix with a lot of good recommendations regarding pitfalls in software testing. Apart from that, the content is pretty weak, and too focused
on measuring.
• Cem Kaner
• Fiona Charles
• Michael Bolton
• Jonathan Kohl
• James Bach
Sweden
The world is not fair; we could change that, or at least move in a better direction.
I think I love testing because it has such a great deal of creativity. And because I’m happy
when I break things...
Contact Details
www.thetesteye.com
You can find my mail address if you want to.
Rob Healy
• Geekonomics by David Rice
• The Testers Pocketbook by Paul Gerrard
• Software Test Automation, by Fewster and Graham
• The Day of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
• Testing Computer Software, Second Edition by Kaner, Falk and Nguygen
Learn to think objectively and dispassionately about a subject. Try to challenge a topic. Ask
the 5 why’s regularly. Improve reporting and communication skills.
A good defect reporting system.
There have been lots. One of my earliest was when doing a tutorial for a major Mechani-
cal Engineering Software company I made a simple mistake and clicked the Back button to
correct it. However, later in setup this step caused the entire application to crash and wipe
out data. It took 2 days to find the precise point where this happened and when it got fixed I
received a lot of plaudits from my managers and the developers alike.
su administrator
cd /
rm -rf *
(For those uninitiated in Linux, this will promptly delete your entire machine)
The recession. As companies struggle to survive cost bases are being altered. Experienced
testers with an eye for quality are being replaced with cheaper alternatives whose focus (in
my experience) is primarily on retention of their jobs, frequently by saying “Yes” to all questions from management. A tester who always says “Yes” is neither honest nor useful.
The rise of the user. My mother (a 62 year old) with no technical expertise now understands
“apps” and expects everything to just work. The VCR defeated her but she expects her
phone to have the answer to the worlds problems at her fingertips 24/7. I fail to see how we
can keep up as software shifts into the mainstream where users with no technical knowledge MUST be able to use it with no prior training or exposure.
To each his own. I did one from the AST but didn’t enjoy it at all (see my post “Inglourious
bASTerds” on the STC). If you think becoming certified will get you a job then fire ahead. If
you can demonstrate to me 5 potential flaws in a design from the description alone then I
am more likely to recommend you for a position.
Rob Lambert / Rosie Sherry / Phil Kirkham (all the STC admins)
Tony Bruce (THE Tester to know in London)
Michael Bolton (such a lovely fellow, even when you don’t agree)
Anna Baik - taking the testing world by storm
Dave Whalen - I love the controversy!
The Software Testing Club is an innovative space in which the testing community can flourish and grow. What has been setup there has been a tremendous boon to all of our efforts
to get recognition for testers and our work. This book is yet another clever project to give
testers a voice, an identity and help others at the same time! Oxfam is a worthy charity in
their development and humanitarian work to prevent famine and social injustice globally.
Every day I create or do something new and different. I am constantly solving a new challenge or assessing the risk of new development. What’s not to love? :)
Contact Details
Join me on Twitter: @zerob000
http://www.softwarehealing.blogspot.com/
Mitch Goldman
• Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern Pragmatic Project Management by Johanna Roth•
•
•
•
man
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Bridging the Communication Gap, by Gojko Adzic
How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Testing, James A. Whittaker:
Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, by Janet Gregory and
Lisa Crispin
Practice. Experiment. Ask questions. Contribute. Try to teach others. Seek out knowledge
and training, don’t wait for it to be given to you. Every week, try something different.
My senses. Eyes, ears, memory, instinct.
For a children’s game, the uninstaller was programmed to simply delete the folder that the
game was installed into. So if you chose to install it to the root “C” drive, when you unin-
stalled it would delete everything on the “C” drive -- operating system and all. They had to
delay shipping the product for that one, and I earned a special bonus for finding it.
Making assumptions about what is the correct behaviour, using my own judgment instead
of asking for clarification. I’ve let many bugs get through because I thought they were doing
the right thing, but they weren’t.
Specialization. Companies seeking testers who only have exactly the skills on the tools/
technology they’re looking for, rather than a well-rounded tester with experience. This puts
testers into a corner where they only know a few specialized skills but are not versatile.
Higher technical skills needed for setup & configuration -- cloud-based technologies, virtual
machines, mobile devices, etc.
None of the current certifications are worth a dime. They are all very poor and do not teach
good software practices (especially ISTQB and ISEB, which are downright dangerous).
What is needed are some certifications which teach and prove actual technical skill, making
more use of workshops and mentoring and collaboration. If good memorization skills are all
that’s needed to pass a certification test, then it has no value and should be discouraged. I
would never hire someone who says that they are ISEB-certified and actually believed that
it meant that it proved that they have any testing skill.
• Marta Gonzalez Ferrero
• Carl Brockwell
• Michael Bolton
• James Lyndsay
• Antony Marcano
England
Because it’s fun to find bugs and to contribute value to the product by doing it.
Contact Details
LondonMitch (Twitter)
Adriana Pymble
• A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design - Copeland, Lee
• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams - Lisa Crispin, Janet
Gregory
• Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010 - Mickey Gousset, Krishnamoorthy, Ajoy, Woodward, Martin
• Bridging the Communication Gap - Gojko Adzic
• How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Testing - Whittaker, James A
SIGIST conferences; there are workshops at the conferences that gives you exposure to
testers from different businesses with insight on how other testers accomplishes tasks out
there. There are also talks by representatives of large companies. Reading blogs, receiving
online magazines (Better Software), books etc. You can do all of the above but in the end it
comes down to the company you work for and how committed they are to quality. The more
committed the better chance you have of actually implementing and using the techniques
and technology out there to improve your skills as a tester.
I know it is old school but Winmerge is my favourite. I use it with a tool that a kind developer
created for me to extract all tables from a database (customizable) that I use for paral-
lel testing. You can set the colours on it to see quickly what has changed from before the
change to after the change. It is useful to find missing updates on fields when developers
uses workbenches to enter data instead of the WebUI.
I would say that it would have to be the bugs that have been in the system for a while and
no one noticed it. I found a calculation error once that seemed small but when summed up
over a period of time it was a substantial loss for the company that would use it. I got it be-
fore it was released. But then I would say that crashing the system every other day is pretty
impressive as well and I get more enjoyment out of that than any other bug that I find. The
look on developers faces when you go ‘Oh no’ is priceless.
When I just started out I had no clue about test environments and client environments. I was
fairly confident that my build was ready to be released by testing it locally, not taking into
account that the client’s environment might be different (and their databases have different
data than mine). Let’s just say that the client had to roll back their environment and I ended
up red faced and apologising. The good thing was that the manager realised that we need
more testing environments and after a mistake like that the Director was not going to say no.
Companies don’t have money to invest in testing and testers have to improve their skills with
their own means. Automation is becoming more important as testers do more than one testers job and need the automation to cover e.g. regression as there is no time for it. Testing
has branched out. Testers do documentation, help files, packaging builds, implementation
specifications, business analysis, automation and testing off course in one position in one
company. It seems that everywhere you go these days testing is overlapping with another
department in the organization you are in.
The rapid development of technology like I-Pads, e-readers etc. The move to a more web
based society where most applications need to be accessed via the web as well.
I have completed the Practitioner certificate for Test analysts and I think it is a good certifi-
cation to have to show that you are committed to testing and to learn what for example what
test techniques are available. In my day to day testing I could rather use a course for the
automation tool that I’m trying to implement.
I think it is a great idea as I come from a country where poverty is a common and I have
seen the damages that it causes.
It can’t get better when you get paid to sit and break software the whole day. On a more
serious note though, having a passion for quality it is very satisfying to release a product to
the users and receiving positive feedback.
Clare Rawson
• A Practitioner’s Guide to software Test design by Lee Copeland
• Testing Computer Software by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, hung Quoc Nguyen
• Agile Testing: A practical guide for testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet
Gregory
Embrace change! it makes you re-evaluate what you have been doing and how you might
improve it. Realise that your testing approach may need to adapt to changes happening
around you. Get Information from blogs, forums etc, they contain the most up to date information
I have found using a SCRUM board has been very useful for our team whilst working with
agile, it helps to control flow and provide visibility to the whole team about what is happening
Not being able to log into our customer account, due to a change made by another team,
unrelated to our project
Protecting the ‘test’ function. Recently, with many companies using agile processes many
people’s view is that ‘anyone can test’ although I feel that people can help with testing I
don’t think this statement is entirely true, testing is a skill as much as development is and
we should utilise our test specialist to give us the best products.
I have gained the ISEB Foundation and Intermediary qualifications. I felt that the foundation
was a very good all-rounder for people relatively new to testing or who ‘fell’ into testing and
have been doing it for some time with little direction. Although I felt the intermediary course
was very beneficial I felt that the exam could be improved, it was very ivory tower and some
of the answers were non-sensical. On our course there were times in the practice exams
when you all put the same ‘wrong’ answer-that doesn’t make sense to me!
• Lisa Crispin
• Bob Galen
England
It’s a good way for testers to share experiences, and for a worthwhile cause! It’s also a good
way of raising awareness for Oxfam who offer a lot of people support they might not otherwise get
It’s challenging and always different, it’s not something a large amount of people specifically
aim at doing but nearly all testers I have come across are passionate about what they do.
Contact Details
clarerawson@ymail.com
Sue Dwyer
The Outliers Malcolm Gladwell
Learn more, think more
Understand the process you’re testing
A government identification system which allowed you to create and verify an identity, verify
their entitlement, double confirm every process and then at the end you could change the
name and address on the entitlement card because the card database didn’t cross check
the name and entitlement databases
Getting bogged down by inadequate specifications and forgetting the process
Maintaining professionalism with poorly trained/overconfident staff and escalating time/cost
pressures
Much the same = people will always be the wild card in IT won’t they?
They’re just one tool. They prove that a tester can be bothered to enrol, pay and turn up
for an exam. How do you certify that a tester can consistently do their job? I met a young
developer at the ISTQB exam who said he hated testing but thought certifications looked
good on his CV.
Australia
I love the constant challenge. I love having to learn new stuff, debate stuff, prove stuff and
break stuff.
Anne-Marie Charrett
• The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Philosopher’s Toolkit by Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl
• Agile Testing: by Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory
At the moment I’m finding that helping others learn more about testing is deepening my
understanding of testing. I’m able to sort out what is really important to me and what I can
leave. This is helping me define my own personal view and experience of testing.
One valuable tool I’m discovering at the moment is the value of coaching and teaching others as a tool to deepening your understanding. I’m starting to think that perhaps coaching
and mentoring testers is an essential tool in a testers toolkit.
I try not to be too impressed by the bugs I find any more. I don’t think developers quite see
the bug in the same way, and turning up with a smug look on your face tends not to go
down to well. Having said that, I seemed to have a knack for finding bugs in distributed
systems. One design fault in particular where the reporting system was on one system, the
error logs on another, with no way of interconnecting the two systems.
Breaking a state of the art PC on my third day of my first job
I think the biggest challenge is mediocrity in testing regardless of whether its automated or
manual. I try to change this by providing free online coaching on software testing through
Skype.
I don’t see it changing that much in the next 2 to 3 years to be honest. Unfortunately the
level that passes as testing is pretty low. Technology (as it always does) will change, and
testers will need to adapt to those new technologies, but that’s nothing new. I do think
testers will need to become more technical and automation will have a bigger influence than
before but I see that as a good thing.
Personally, I find the discussion on certification pretty pointless. I would like to see more
discussion on what we can do to improve the situation.
• David O’ Dowd
• Trish Khoo
Ireland
I love software testing because its opened me up to a world of learning and exploration. For
example, recently I’ve re-discovered my interest in Philosophy.
Contact Details
email: amcharrett@testingtimes.com.au
skype: charretts
twitter: charrett
web: http://mavericktester.com
Curtis Stuehrenberg
• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C Martin
• Cost & Effect: Using Integrated Cost Systems to Drive Profitability and Performance by
Robert S Kaplan
• Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide by Craig Larman
• Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Testing by Elfriede Dustin
Skills are only improved with better practice. When I was studying music, my instructor
used to say “practice does not make perfect, only perfect practice makes a perfect perfor-
mance.” Over my life I have some to realize how correct she was in that statement. So my
advice is to internalize the fundamentals and theory through study and couple it with actual
testing with as many varied people and groups as possible.
My brain. It may sound cheeky, but its a true and honest answer. I have yet to find a
program, framework, methodology, solution, or practice that comes close to surpassing the
usefulness of a curious mind coupled with a sound base in critical thought. The old adage
of “to the man with a hammer, all problems start to look like they can be solved with nails”
is never more true than in software development. So I’ve yet to find a “tool” more valuable
than the ability to critically analyze what we’re doing to measure its effectiveness even if
change will require sacrificing a few golden geese.
I honestly can’t remember. The most impressive bug for me is the one I have yet to find in a
system I really want to do well.
When I started out my career, I fell into the “we know better than the customer” crap that’s
a subtle undercurrent to many companies in our industry. I’ve encountered it in hugely successful international companies with billions in annual revenue down to fifteen person lean
start-up with no funds for the next quarter unless they can show a profit. I forgot the basic
tenet of business which is you stay in business by delivering perceived value to your current
and potential customers. No one stayed in business delivering software, even if it was bug
free.
Testing is abysmally late to the party as far as agile is concerned. Coders and project
managers have been wrestling with lean manufacturing and other concepts for nearly two
decades now, yet most testers still seem to think “agile” is just another development framework similar to waterfall or evo. Unfortunately several certification boards and consultancy
firms have moved to take advantage of this ignorance and are now offering products that
propagate this fallacy.
The biggest challenge I mentioned earlier will also be the biggest challenge we face in the
next two to three years. We have a lot of time to make up and the longer we argue about
a mythical “Agile Methodology” the further behind we’ll slip and the less relevant we’ll be to
actual software development projects. We’re already seeing the results as more and more
testing jobs are being removed in favour of agile developers, project manager, and business
analysts versed in multiple disciplines who actually “get it.”
It’s useful for getting a job at a lot of companies unable to unwilling to practice active
screening for good long-term employment candidates. I haven’t found testing certifications
to be of much use otherwise, and as a manager have actually found them to be a detriment
to some. If, for instance, I am staffing a company that practices the agile philosophy or lean
development practices, if I see someone has ASQ or ISTQB certification I’m likely to pass
them over immediately. Its an unfortunate generalization, but its been my experience that
people with those certs are not able to make the leap into the agile paradigm. Hiring them
would mean looking forward to endless debates about “correctness” and “coverage.”
• Mallika Chellappa
• Pradeep Soundararajan
• Selena Delesie
• Matt Heusser
• Markus Gaertner
United States
Oxfam is one of the few charities to which my family directly contributes. We have heard
from colleagues and friends how effective Oxfam is with working locally to find local solu-
tions to seemingly intractable problems. Even if you are not interested in this book, I would
strongly suggest you research the charity and consider donating what you can to their efforts.
I love breaking things. I also love figuring out all 85 ways a problem could have been
solved or a solution could have been used, as opposed to finding the “best” way or one. I
love sliding on someone else’s skin to represent them at the earliest stages of a product’s
development, making sure their voice is heard so they get the most enjoyment and value
out of what we do.
Contact Details
Twitter: @cowboytesting
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/curtis-stuehrenberg/2/b6/447
WordPress: http://cowboytesting.wordpress.com/
Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship: http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/
Simon Morley
• Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really is - Weinberg, Gause
• An Introduction to General Systems Thinking - Weinberg
• Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious - Gigerenzer
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Taleb
• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions About Testing - Weinberg
I don’t think of testing skills, but rather the skills that are useful to a tester. These include
all the elements that would combine an investigative journalist, CSI technician, philosopher,
historian, applied scientist - and occasional comedian/satirist (or is that just me?)
1 brain (manual version with five-speed gearbox and optional cruise-control).
• 1st gear - getting rid of inertia quickly. (Getting motivated to think)
• 2nd gear - handy for continuing getting up to speed, negotiating tight corners and useful for engine-braking. (Getting over the initial mental bump, dusting off the cobwebs,
beginning to understand the problem...)
• 3rd gear - picking up speed. (Researching around different resources.)
• 4th gear - almost cruising, but maybe some final acceleration needed. (Pulling resources together and following up leads.)
• 5th gear - cruising, coasting along with either time for the senses to rest of allowing
more time for the senses to concentrate. (Producing your own work now. In the zone!)
• Cruise control: Maintains focus, energy levels for a period - could be that energy levels
are maintained whilst de-focusing. (In the zone, and making it look easy!)
When I used to work with mobile handsets then finding faults in implemented 3rd party
conformance test suites was always nice - because they had usually been through so many
hands by that point and these were “official”.
No idea. I once remotely logged onto a system, installed new software and rebooted
it - ran my pre-configuration script only to find the system wasn’t behaving as it should. It
turned out that I’d rebooted someone else’s system and then continued testing on “my”
system - I went round to inform them (sheepishly) as soon as I realised. I’ve made loads
of mistakes - sometimes because of not reading user/operational manuals correctly - usu-
ally because you think you know how something should/does work. It usually highlights a
mistake in your thinking or assumptions - and when you work that out you can learn from it.
Communicating testing: Getting managers, project people and other non-testers to understand what testing is and isn’t and then understand the differences between testing and
good testing, getting the role of good testing accepted as an intellectually challenging dis-
cipline. Sometimes this is about understanding what we really want and need from testing
and distinguishing that from buzzwords.
A continuation of the above and continuing to link in the diverse strands of knowledge
needed to do good testing - and being able to communicate this.
I think they’re superb - everyone should start their own! This is really self-governed certification. Finding a form in which you can display your thinking is important. Point to things
you have done or written (blogs, comments, articles or things other people say about you).
Be prepared to demonstrate testing “live”.
Henrik Emilsson
Martin Jansson
Rikard Edgren
Abraham Heward
Sweden
This is a superb initiative to get people involved in contributing their testing-related thoughts
and have a contribution to a great charity that helps the needy and crisis-stricken around
the world!
It’s intellectually challenging and allows me to continually learn about new technologies and
also fields of study that are not traditionally related to software testing. A very big challenge
is talking to non-testers about testing - changing their pre-conceptions about it is sometimes difficult but very rewarding.
Contact Details
Twitter: YorkyAbroad email via the contact in the blog
Web: http://testers-headache.blogspot.com/
a
Brief
Freddy Gustavsson
• Foundations of Software Testing: ISTQB Certification by Dorothy Graham, Erik van
Veenendaal, Isabel Evans and Rex Black
• Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design
by James A. Whittaker
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Content-Driven Approach by Cem Kaner,
James Bach and Bret Pettichord
• People ware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• TPI NEXT: Business Driven Test Process Improvement by Sogeti
A good tester is curious and always eager to learn more. My advice to a new tester is to
be active. Read as much as you can. Browse your local bookstore or library for interesting
books about software testing, computer science and technology, but also for more general
subjects like cognitive psychology, pedagogy and learning, and other topics that are of
interest to you. Use the web to find articles and discussions. Internet is also great for joining
communities and interacting with fellow testers. Join the Software Testing Club and Linke-
dIn Groups. Twitter can also be a good source of inspiration, so go ahead and follow some
of your favourite testers today. If you want to get your feet wet and practise testing, you can
sign up for a weekend-testing challenge or join the uTest worldwide community of testers.
Oh yeah, and perhaps most importantly, remember to have fun along the way.
Session-based test management is a great “tool” to use in conjunction with exploratory testing. I have tried it out in a team of software developers this year and achieved fine results.
The key issue about exploratory testing, as I see it, is to make the work process measurable and controllable. Unfortunately, many people think that exploratory testing equals
unplanned, ad-hoc, sloppy, [insert adjective here] testing. Session-based testing offers
a remedy to that, providing the necessary frames to allow planning and follow-up on the
results, just like we do for traditional scripted testing.
On several occasions I have found issues in products that would crash the system and
preventing the user from going on using it until the system had been completely restarted. For
critical systems such issues are extremely serious. Also, I have discovered security flaws in
applications, that would have allowed a user to bypass login mechanisms, accessing “hidden”
files on the server and even running commands directly against a database.
Not approaching the developers, whose features I was about to test, early enough. Testers
and developers should work together. Sitting down with a developer, discussing what and how
to test, can do wonders. Developers tend to have a deep technical understanding of the sys-
tem. Take advantage of it to collect ideas for your testing - but don’t trust developers who try to
convince you that their code is bug-free.
Testing is still a relatively young field, and a lot of things still need to be defined. Anyone can
do testing, but what about doing GOOD testing? We need to keep working to research and
establish excellent working approaches in our field.
In the coming years we will see more examples of problems caused by organizations trying to
cut costs by outsourcing development and testing. This is a delicate task which requires good
planning, management and communication in order to work well. Some organizations will succeed in finding good ways of working, while others will go back to working in the old way.
I think testing certifications offer a good way to get started in our field and learn the basics
about approaches and principles. Being certified shows that you have successfully mastered
the theory behind the certification. But of course, a certification alone does not make you a
good tester. For that you need lots and lots of real-life practise. A certification can, at best,
provide some of the tools to get you started.
Rob Lambert
Markus Gärtner
Anna Baik
Anne-Marie Charrett
Sweden
Christmas is definitely a time for reaching out and thinking about the people around you. In
this spirit, I would encourage everyone to help supporting the work of Oxfam.
Software testing is one of the most interesting, challenging and fun tasks I can think of in
the IT industry. As a tester you have the chance to use your creative side to find the nastiest
bugs before they get a chance to bite the end-user. It gives me great satisfaction to know
that my work as a tester contributes to a better overall quality of the product. As a tester I’m
done only when the user is completely happy with the product.
Contact Details
My blog, currently Swedish only: http://www.happyday20.se/
E-mail: freddy (at) happyday20 (dot) se
This is the end of the ebook, but all is not lost! There is still plenty more to do.
Don’t forget to donate to Oxfam here: www.justgiving.com/testingclub/
Plenty more content, people, activity and fun over at The Software Testing Club.
Drop on by...
http://blog.softwaretestingclub.com
Twitter: @testingclub

A Tester Is For Life

Transcription

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