Beautiful Testing

Successful software depends as much on scrupulous testing as it does on solid architecture or elegant code. But testing is not a routine process, it’s a constant exploration of methods and an evolution of good ideas.

Beautiful Testing (O’Reilly, $49.99 USD), edited by Adam Goucher and Tim Riley, offers 23 essays from 27 leading technical testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you’ll learn how each of these professionals developed beautiful ways of testing a wide range of products–valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects.

"Readers will be able to jump in and start using the tools and techniques right now. The book has very practical examples and extensive links where they can find additional information," says Riley (@timr50).

"In each chapter we each learned at least one thing…We both have over a decade of testing experience and have read a lot of material in that time. If we learned something in each chapter, then most readers should as well and that, to us, is the measure of a great resource book," says Goucher (@adamgoucher).

Here’s a sample of what you’ll find inside:

1. Microsoft’s Alan Page knows a lot about large-scale test automation, and shares some of his secrets on how to make it beautiful
2. Scott Barber explains why performance testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speed
3. Karen Johnson describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical software
4. Rex Black reveals how satisfying stakeholders for 25 years is a beautiful thing
5. Mathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generators

Advance Praise

"Any one of the insights or practical suggestions from these testing gurus would be worth the price of the book. The ideas are elegant and possibly challenging, yet are presented clearly and enthusiastically. This comprehensive, ambitious, engaging, and entertaining collection belongs on the bookshelf of every testing professional."

–Ken Doran, QA Lead, Stanford University; Chair, Silicon Valley Software Quality Association

All author royalties will be donated to the Nothing But Nets (@NothingButNets) campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a disease that kills millions of children in Africa each year.

Follow Adam and Tim’s tweets at @BeautifulTest.

Adam Goucher has been testing software professionally for over ten years. In that time he has worked with start-ups, large multi-nationals and ones in between in both traditional and agile testing environments. A believer in the communication of ideas big and small, he writes frequently at Adam Goucher and teaches testing skills at a Toronto area technical college.

Tim Riley is the Director of Quality Assurance at Mozilla. He has tested software for 18 years including everything from spacecraft simulators, ground control systems, high security operating systems, language platforms, application servers, hosted services and open source web applications.

Note: The words with @ denotes the twitter.com (http://www.twitter.com) ID’s of the respective authors/reviewers.

Keys: testing, oreilly, software, microsoft, tech