This past weekend, I finally made time to start reading Agile Testing: A Practical Guide For Testers And Agile Teams, Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley (2009).  I made it through the first two chapters before life called me away.  After I put the book down and starting going about accomplishing a mundane series of errands, I realized that I was feeling disappointed and that the disappointment had started growing just a few pages into the book.  Not because of what the book had to say, what it said was pretty good – not exactly how I would have expressed a few things, but thus is the plight of a writer reading what someone else has written on a topic they also care and write about.  What was disappointing me was the fact that the stuff in those chapters needed to be said at all.

Due to the overwhelming success and positive reviews of the last STP Online Summit: Business Value of Performance Testing, we've decided to do it again -- only this time, we're going to explore Achieving Business Value with Test Automation.

Join me (while I continue practicing my radio host skills for my emergency back-up career as a sportscaster) and 7 other presenters that I consider to be elite practitioners, teachers, and thinkers in their test automation areas of specialization for 3 half days online to learn their tips and methods for achieving business value with test automation. If you or your organization are using, or thinking about using, automation to enhance or improve your testing, you're not going to want to miss this online summit. I honestly can't think of anywhere else you can get this concentration of relevant and thematically targeted information at a better price, but you be the judge:

When: Tuesday October 11 10:00AM - Thursday October 13 1:30PM PST

Cost: $195 USD before 9/26/11 $245 USD after 9/26/11

Theme: For more than 15 years organizations have been investing in the promise of better, cheaper, and faster testing through automation. While some companies have achieved demonstrable business value from their forays into test automation, many others have experienced questionable to negative returns on their investments. Join your host, Scott Barber, for this three day online summit, to hear how seven recognized leaders in test automation have achieved real business value by implementing a variety of automation flavors and styles for their employers and clients. Learn how to answer the ROI question by focusing on business value instead of testing tasks, and how to implement automation in ways that deliver that value to the business, not just to the development and/or test team.

The Centro de Ensayos de Software (CES), a non-profit software testing laboratory in Uruguay, has recently launched a program that is certain to become the new “gold standard” in professional development for software testers.  The program, endorsed by the Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), the Universidad Castilla La Mancha (Spain), and sanctioned by the Uruguayan IT Chamber (CUTI), is the most comprehensive, affordable, and publicly available training program for software testers on the market.  Based on my market research and comprehensive review of the program, I have no reservation in rating it as market leading.

I guess it’s that time again.  What time is that, you ask?  It’s the time when discussion/debate flares up over Context-Driven. I’m not going to weigh in on the whole discussion of pros/cons, value/distraction, etc.  I am a consultant.  I am Context-Driven (and not just as a tester, it's simply the way I have operated since long before I was a tester and long before I became aware someone had coined a term and composed a set of principles around how I already operated).  The license plate on my car says “CONTEXT”. It works for me.  But my point isn’t to convince you that it’s right for you.  My point is to address a comment that I frequently hear that *feels* very sad to me.

“Where I work, I don’t have the freedom or authority to implement all this Context-Driven stuff, so I guess I don’t get to be part of the club.”

I find this sad, because I don’t agree.  It is my opinion that “Where I work, I don’t have the freedom or authority…” *is* a "driving context", making smart decisions about what you are empowered to choose, and appropriately trying to inform/educate those who are "driving your context" that there are other options qualifies as being Context-Driven... at least to me.

uTest is doing a series of interviews with interesting/well-known testers. I was flattered to be asked to be interviewed recently and found that I enjoyed answering the questions... and didn't hate my answers when I read them as posted (any of you who have ever done that sort of thing know that is a fairly significant statement!)

My interview is "Testing the Limits with Scott Barber": Part I, Part II, Part III

I was pleased to see Michael Bolton's series on Testing vs. Checking. If you haven't been following, what I consider to be the central thread of the topic (and the unfortunately inevitable fallout that seems to happen in "testerland" almost any time someone says something that makes sense).

From Michael:

• http://www.developsense.com/2009/08/testing-vs-checking.html
• http://www.developsense.com/2009/09/transpection-and-three-elements-of.html
• http://www.developsense.com/2009/09/pass-vs-fail-vs-is-there-problem-here.html
• http://www.developsense.com/2009/09/elements-of-testing-and-checking.html

From James Bach:

• http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/358

From Scott Barber:

• http://www.perftestplus.com/resources/014PeakPerf.pdf Original, ST&P Magazine, 2005
• http://www.logigear.com/newsletter/investigation_vs_validation.asp Reprinted by Logigear, 2007

Wired.com ran their smart list today. If you aren't familiar with it or don't care, at least check out the great press fellow software tester, entrepreneur, and social innovator Thorkil Sonne is getting for Specialisterne here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist_sonne