Testing-Essentials ▪ Think Like a Tester ▪ Test Strategy ▪ Test Tooling, Automation ▪ Test Analysis and -Design ▪ Performing Tests and Reporting ▪ Appendix
Active curiosity is an important attribute of effective testing, because you’ll never know exactly what you should be looking for. – Weinberg.
Testing well is challenging mental work, and calls for a particular mindset:
We have to do things to the system that no-one else will do. Things that no one else is prepared to do. Things that no-one else can even conceptualise that it is something that you would ever want to do. – Richardson.
And at the same time, the mindset that makes for excellence in testing has caring about doing the work well in common with the mindset that makes for excellence in any other profession:
there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all: caring about what you are doing – Pirsig
In testing as in all knowledge work, know-how quickly becomes outdated. Keeping up demands continuous learning - acquiring and deepening knowledge, developing and improving technical and soft skills. Having a learning system set up and in daily use, fostering a note-taking habit and practicing modeling will enable you to keep up with what could otherwise be an overwhelming amount of learning, and make your learning more effective.
You will want to be comfortable working with different:
Here’s James Bach’s map of knowledge and skills to add to your life-long learning journey backlog. Spoiler alert: it’s BIG! Feel free to choose if or when to start learning about any of the topics on the map, and delve as deeply into them as you wish. It’s your journey!
As a point of reference, here’s a Programmer Competency Matrix model for mastery in that field, and NASA’s Competency Model for Systems Engineers.
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