Lessons Learned in Software Testing
The latest book I’ve finished on my “read a tech book a month” plan was Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord. Since I spent the early part of 2009 pitching a QA program at Pulse, so I figure I should retroactively learn how to do it. Testing is also a huge part of the software development process so I think it would be good to know what some of the experts think about it.
The book is setup as a 293 individual lessons for testing software over a number of sections. I guess it’s setup such that you can skim very easily by checking the tip and seeing if it’s worth reading the explanation of it. I read them all for completeness but some of the sections weren’t entirely relevant; ie. “Your Career in Testing”.
A lot of the lessons are actually pretty straight forward but I’m finding that a lot of the good books in various disciplines are really more about getting everyone on the same page. There really isn’t that much that is controversial in terms of methodologies but it is an older book. Although, one could easily the books that have the most influence are the ones that seem the most obvious several years down the road.
We give this book to any new testers at work. This really is their training program in terms of software testing since we don’t have much time to train them otherwise. Also, we tend to (very intentionally) hire testers from outside the programmer realm to get a broad view of our software so giving them a time tested book about testing gives them a decent place to start work.
There are a couple of gems in there. I wish everyone actually believed the one I found most relevant to my current situation: “Bug counts are, at best, worthless measures of the effectiveness of your staff. They’re misleading and demotivating, and they allow you to think you know a lot more than you know. At worst, they make the wrong people look good, and the best people look incompetent.”