21 7 / 2008
Effective testing ideals that can support (some of) the agile process [review/QA]
Over the weekend, I had a chance to peruse Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve your Testing, by author Elfriede Dustin, who composed and detailed nearly all of the cookie cutter strategies that introduce standard SDLC testing procedures to the intermediate or novice tester.
Depending on your experiences, if you’re looking for a refresher, or perhaps a better way to improve your career choice in QA, then this book is a firm roadmap to better QA knowledge. The book itemizes key areas of test procedures that are almost second nature, practically standard in most development organizations, which include planning, to documentation, to test execution, to defect reporting and management, and all of it is essential, especially if you need blueprints to improve any one of those areas.
For those of us who are on the agile path, in chapter 6 of this book, it emphasizes unit testing and its value of being integrated firmly within the whole development/test process – so that may bring a smile to the supporters of jUnit, nUnit, or xUnit frameworks, but if you’re Scrum savvy, this book is old school. Unlike the agile customer-centric planning and analysis, this book follows the SDLC to the letter, and there are no iteration or Story based weekly plan procedures, but all is not lost. The book stays on point, especially for the typical CMM crowd, and it holds a lot of merit. In particular, it provides an excellent walkthrough on automated testing management procedures, and non-functional test strategies that are almost always misunderstood by product and program managers as the catch all for last resorts. If you get a chance, pick up a copy through Amazon (or as I did – strut over to the book section in Fry’s) and grab a copy. It’s a nice addition to any erudite tester’s bookshelf.
