Carnival of Testers #17

" #softwaretesting #testing "

December. A flood of posts - usually lots of reflections and year-end summaries, but also lots of variety and range of topics.

Confer-ence
There were some great reports, write-ups and postings concerning the EuroStar2010 conference.

• Nathalie de Vries made a comprehensive round-up of the tutorial and conference days, here, here, here and here.

• Nathalie also gave some tips for people considering sending in a proposal for the next conference.

• A taster of the Danish Alliance was given by Zeger Van Hese, here.

• Another comprehensive round-up of EuroStar conference was made by Michael Bolton, here, here and here.

Questioning

All good testers question what they're doing, observing or being presented with.

• A well laid-out set of discussion points relating to an interview with Rex Black was presented by Ben Kelly. Let's hope there's a follow-up post with some results.

• Pete Houghton highlighted some of the problems with the thinking connected to regression testing.

Inspiration and resources

Sources of ideas, tools and techniques in use by testers everyday...

• Do you ever test to music? Some interesting insights in Christin Wiedeman's use of music in her testing, here.

• I enjoyed reading Chris McMahon's story about some of his idea sources.

• Rikard Edgren's take on "Exploring Requirements" was a reminder of a great book that is also useful to testers.

• If you haven't seen or tried corkboardme then take a look at Tim Coulter's introduction.

• Transpection. Stephen Hill made a good write-up of his experience with it, even including the transcript of the session, which is worth a read.

And finally...

• Be careful what you measure, and why, was wrapped up into Jerry Weinberg's parable of the ones.

• Michael Larsen's reflection on the year was an inspiring read. Nuff said!

• Markus Gärtner announced a repository for testing challenges, here.

Update: 2 Jan 2011: I meant to add this, but it slipped through the gaps... 

• Tobbe Ryber posted a notice to say his book (Essential Software Test Design) was now available for free download. It's a worthwhile reference - even if you have the paper copy - highly recommended!

Until the next time...