A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #53 - April 7, 2018
Several thought leaders in the testing space have published manifesto-style documents that define what modern testing is all about, let’s take a look at them. I’m sure this is not a complete set of manifestos (manifesti?) in the testing space - if you know of other good ones, please send me a line!
The Agile Testing Manifesto by Karen Greaves and Sam Laing (Growing Agile folks) from a few years ago comes in the form of a slide, so I will repeat the points here in text form: Testing throughout OVER testing at the end; Preventing bugs OVER finding bugs; Testing understanding OVER checking functionality; Building the best system OVER breaking the system; Team responsibility for quality OVER tester responsibility.
https://www.growingagile.co.za/2015/04/the-testing-manifesto/
There’s a bit of explanation in this post:
https://www.luxoft-training.com/news/the-agile-testing-manifesto/
And this blog contrasts the world of agile testing to what used to happen when people did not follow these principles:
https://www.clariontech.com/blog/in-a-world-without-an-agile-testing-manifesto
James Bach offers up “A Tester’s Commitments”, starting with “I provide a service” and “I am not the gatekeeper of quality”:
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/652
Continuous Testing Manifesto by Russ Smith of RainforestQA is worth a read. Continuous testing (or any good testing, really) should be: modular; rightsized; measurable; early in the release cycle; on a foundation of unit testing; version controlled; part of CI; pluggable into dev tooling.
https://www.rainforestqa.com/continuous-testing/
Another take on Continuous Testing Manifesto by Jan Schwenzien of TestIO focuses on “testing with people”, combining automated and human testing efficiently:
https://test.io/blog/test-io-continuous-testing-manifesto/
Here, Brendan Connolly laid out a Regression Testing Manifesto in 4 parts: Intent over Implementation; Common over Complete; Behavior over Bugs; and Conformity over Complexity. The last post links to the previous 3.
http://www.brendanconnolly.net/regression-testing-manifesto-conformity-over-complexity/
While this is not strictly for testing, I view observability as an important aspect of work for a quality team, so let’s throw Charity Majors’ observability manifesto in here as well. “Observability means you can understand how your systems are working on the inside just by asking questions from outside. This is what makes complex systems tractable…”
https://honeycomb.io/blog/2018/03/observability-a-manifesto/
Akin to a manifesto, this post lays out guiding principles for a test team. Despite the cheesy paragraphs, it’s a decent set of principles:
http://thinktesting.com/articles/software-testing-guiding-principles/
Worth learning: graph theory, from Königsberg bridges to data structures fit for AirBnB and Twitter:
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/i-dont-understand-graph-theory-1c96572a1401
If you received this email directly then you’re already signed up, thanks! Else if this newsletter issue was forwarded to you and you’d like to get one weekly, then you can subscribe at http://testersdigest.mehras.net
If you come across content worth sharing, please send me a link at testersdigest@mehras.net