Recent Publications - The Testing Planet

The Testing Planet is a promising young publication devoted to software test, produced by The Software Testing Club. The November 2011 issue is available here.

I happen to have an article in this issue, discussing how there is such a push in the industry for unscripted “Exploratory Testing” that people seem ready to abandon test scripts altogether. I believe this is an overreaction, since scripts serve a number of useful functions that exploratory test cannot replace.

Check it out for yourself, and please let me know what you think.

Exploring Scripted Testing by Sean Morley

The market looks good for software testers... and one reason why

Two articles related to software test caught my eye this week. First, from Forbes - Who's Getting Hired Right Now. Here is an excerpt of the relevant bits:

Online job aggregator Indeed.com has sifted through its database to find the occupations that are hiring the most right now.   [skipping]

Here are the jobs with the most postings. 

Registered Nurses 

Job postings: 132,283 

Truck Drivers, Heavy and Tractor-Trailer 

Job postings: 100,917 

Software Quality Assurance Engineers and Testers 

Job postings: 83,206 

Customer Service Representatives 

Job postings: 67,958 

Sales Managers 

Job postings: 65,925

Interesting that with all of the outsourcing/offshoring we do in the software quality field there is still a strong demand. These figures sparked a very insightful discussion on The Software Testing Club forum on, among other things, how the relevant skills for the field have evolved in the last few years towards programming/automation.

The second piece that struck me was an amusing anecdote about untested software from Jeff Bezos in an article in the Wall Street Journal about the early days of Amazon.com. (Thanks to one of my favorite blogs, QA Hates You, for bringing it to my attention.)

At launch, the site wasn't even truly finished. Mr. Bezos's philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos: "We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books."

Yep, don't forget to test your boundary values. Like Clint Eastwood said, "A man's got to know his limitations."