I had dinner with Michael Bolton and James Bach during STARwest, which was a great feast of ideas and insights in addition to the fine food. One of the interesting new ideas that I hadn’t yet heard of was Black Swan Theory , mentioned by Michael Bolton. As an Australian, I could see nothing unusual about the concept of a Black Swan, but in Europe before the discovery of Australia, a black swan was seen as an impossibility since none had ever been seen. The Black Swan theory relates to an unexpected, radical event that alters your perception of reality. As testers. we are often told the European view that black swans don’t exist (this code is fully tested, two weeks of testing will be more than enough, one retest all you need, works on my machine), but we know that our world is full of black swans we call bugs. There is also the other myth that “all tests must be scripted” disproved by the black swan of exploratory testing.

Below is the paper I submitted as a prologue to an experience report, discussion, and (hopefully) additional research that I'm presenting for the first time during:

Some time back, I blogged about a book I’d been significantly contributing to being available as a free .pdf download. (see the entry here)

Well, the book quietly appeared in “dead tree format” (as Stuart Moncrieff put it in his blog post about the book) a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been getting light heartedly scolded by some of my friends and readers for not making a big announcement, so here’s my “big announcement.”

Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications

by: J.D. Meier, Scott Barber, Carlos Farre, Prashant Bansode, and Dennis Rea is now available on Amazon.