Item Description: Software testing practices reviewed

Review Synopsis:

This is a book on software testing and the test process. It is aimed at a person working in QA, but would be a very good read for anyone having to develop a log term testing strategy at a company or group level.

I have to tell off the bat that I think it's one of the best book ever written on the subject.

The Authors Cem Kaner (http://www.kaner.com/), James Bach (http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/james/ and http://www.satisfice.com/), and Bret Pettichord (http://www.pettichord.com/) are believers that there are not 'best practices' for testing but only 'appropriate practices'. This is called "Context Based testing'. In a way this ties in the Perl philosophy of getting the job done.
Examples of chapters titles are

"thinking like a tester",
"Bug advocacy",
"interacting with programmers",
"test design strategy"

Each chapter is broken into short lessons, about 15 per chapters. The advice is a high level and give you the mental framework to solve your own issues.

I've been testing for a few years now. Each lesson I read rang true to my experiences. It gets you back to the actual job of testing rather then getting lost in process. They treat testing a a scientific process rather then a bureaucratic one.

Many years ago James Back wrote an article that changed the way I think of testing
"Exploratory Testing" (http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf). After that I read everything I could find by him.

Bret Pettichord give a course call "Homebrew Test Automation" we he uses Ruby to teach test automation without using commercial tools.

Edit by castaway, turned URLs into links