An updated reading list after agile testing days 2013

I have amended my reading list a bit, some are now done and a some new have been added. 



"Thinking fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

"Explore It" by Elisabeth Hendrickson

"Agile Management 3.0" by Jurgen Appelo

"Tab into Mobile application testing" by Jonathan Kohl

"Are your lights on" by Gerald M Weinberg and Donald C . Gause

"Trust and betrayal in the workplace"by Dennis Reina and Michelle Reina

"The black swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"How to solve it" G. Polya

"Discover to deliver" ?

"How to measure everything"

"Sparks of genius" by ROber and Michele Root-Bernstein

"Gut feelings" Gerd Gigerenzer

"Adaptive thinking" Gerd Gigerenzer



Done:

"Impact Mapping" by Gojko Adzic 

"Agile Test" by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory



A couple of blogs and websites worth visiting:



satisfice.com by James Bach

developsense.com/ by Michael Bolton

http://googletesting.blogspot.dk/

http://happytesting.wordpress.com/ by Sigurdur Birgisson

http://theadventuresofaspacemonkey.blogspot.com by Sami Söderblom

http://www.huibschoots.nl/wordpress/ by Huib Schoots

Being a Pragmatic Tester?

Okay everybody – this is the first time I take a chance and raise my voice… but I think someone has to start this discussion!

Last week I participated in Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, a great conference where I got a lot of new ideas and inspiration, and even more important got to know some great people!

But one thing made me wonder… and sort of made me sad; I got the feeling that fundamentalism has entered our community - Both within the agile community and the context driven community. You are with them, or you are against them, there is only one universal truth and way of testing for parts of that community…. Does that ring a bell anyone?

I don’t really like fundamentalism, not in religion, not in politics and not in testing.

I consider myself a context driven tester, and an agile tester – that is how I work and that is how I want testing to be done... if possible. I know the 12 principles of agile and the 7 principles of context driven testing… and I try to use what they stand for to the best of my abilities and the CONTEXT I am in. 

Yesterday I talked with a very smart man on the phone, and we discussed the fundamentalism in the testing community. He said something like ”I sometimes feel that the context driven community has lost the context” – and to be honest sometimes I feel that he is right.

Now this is where I just don’t get it; the context driven approach is all about CONTEXT – why is it then that I often feel that parts of the context driven community tells me that there is only one universal truth and that is exploration, session based testing, heuristics, algorithms, no formal training and certification, rapid software testing etc. Why is it that I feel that it is not ”allowed” and recognized that someone could actually find themself in another CONTEXT – a place where some things can be applied and others cannot, where artifacts and ways of testing are dictated by standards (safety, military etc) or by contracts.

"Context-driven testers choose their testing objectives, techniques, and deliverables (including test documentation) by looking first to the details of the specific situation, including the desires of the stakeholders who commissioned the testing. The essence of context-driven testing is project-appropriate application of skill and judgment. The Context-Driven School of testing places this approach to testing within a humanistic social and ethical framework."

The quote above is from context-driven-testing.com written by James Bach and Cem Kaner, probably quite a while ago, but I think it in very simple language that we all can understand and comprehend tells us the essence of context driven testing – or at least how I would love context driven testing to be.

If my customer asks me to deliver artifacts or requires testing done in a certain way, I will surely try to convince him otherwise if I do not agree – but if he chooses to continue with his way (which is often the standard-driven-approach) then I will have to accept that and try to do the best of my abilities within that CONTEXT.

Okay I can already hear the first comment; yeah right but you are Sogeti – you have to say that because you are all in to that TMap stuff and you do ISTQB certifications too. But honestly guys; I have been in testing since 1995, standards, agile, exploratory and all the other stuff is a part of my luggage. 

I feel like I am the audience at a boxing game: In the green corner; the context driven community and in the yellow corner TMap/ISQTB/CMMI/TMI/TPI and all the other abbreviations – the “standards test approach” you might say. And now I am forced to cheer for one of the corners, green or yellow. But sorry guys I will not!!

What about another solution, why not be a PRAGMATIC TESTER. What about taking what we can use from the context driven approach, and what we can use from the standards test approach– and then make our own test soup and make it work in the context we are working within. What about the concept of peaceful co-existence? could that work for our community too?


Call it real world call it unicorn world…. Honestly I don’t really care… it would be great if it was our world.