Carnival of Testers #8

You've probably noticed that I haven't settled on a particular format for these carnivals. That's partly intentional - I'm trying different approaches and seeing which "sits" the best. 


So, if you're getting a bit 'sea-sick' with the constant motion of these formats, it's time to break out those pills for this month's installment. Welcome aboard...


Conferences

• The EuroStar2010 video competition generated a lot of interest - plenty of tweets to/from esconfs and a couple of blogs posts, from Anne-Marie Charrett (link) and Rob Lambert (link) - all entries are different and worth a look to find your preference!
• The Google gig this year was the focus of Fred Beringer's interesting prediction, here. 
• SIGiSIT's March conference got good coverage by Stephen Hill, here.

Collaboration and Context

• A lesson in team work from Lisa Crispin is worth a read.
• Peter uses input from several sources to explore ideas around context-specific and context-free questions.
• The STC re-launched crowdsource testing.
• Collaboration and teamwork was demonstrated by Parimala Shankaraiah & Ajay in their 30 minute challenge. Some interesting learning experiences!

Chatting

• The folks at uTest did a two-part interview with Jon Bach, first part of an interesting read here.
• Anne-Marie Charrett highlighted a problem of communication between testers and non-testers.
• Lanette Creamer wrote about her QASIG talk. The slides are worth checking out.

CSI and Comparisons

• Zeger Van Hese wrote about crime scene investigations and an analogy to the testing 'observer effect'.
• The analogies continue with Elizabeth Fiennes' comparison of software development and babies.

Credibility and Confidence

• Read about Pradeep Soundararajan's lessons in discovering what real credibility is...
• Customer confidence as a by-product of testing was in focus from Dhanasekar S, here.

Cars, Controversy and Consistency

• Corporate statements about cars, software testing and computers got the precision attention of James Bach, firstly from Toyota, here and here, followed by CNN, here. Read them for a lesson in critical analysis.
• A compelling case against test case counting was presented by Steve Rowe, here.
• Chris McMahon makes the case to understand what is being estimated...

Copious Output

• Markus Gärtner was busy publishing posts this month! He put together a very readable review of the four Quality Software Management volumes, here. There was also a take on some useful software craftsperson's attributes, here.

Certification

• A case against pseudo-certification was given by Simon Morley, here. If you can do this then you won't need a certification!

Ok, I'll stop rocking the boat and you can step ashore now! Until next month...