I've spent a good deal of time lately thinking about how we frame the problem of software testing - and how we solve it. It impacts how we see the world, and how we treat each other. Over the weekend, I came up with four fundamental strategies in software testing, which I considered writing up as a blog post.
The thing is, blog posts are one-way; I dump a bunch of stuff at the end. Sometimes, if a comment is particularly insightful, it goes in the UPDATE section at the bottom. Or, if a magazine will let me, I might put a first draft of an article here and incorporate your comments.
What if we all could contribute to such an article? What if we could add, remove, update, delete - all version controlled, with possibly even a back story?
There's a tool for this - it's called a wiki. Oh, sure, wikipedia is incredibly popular, but there are many, many wikis that delve deeply into a specific content area. Rahul Verma, an Indian Tester, has even made a free wiki for software testers - the Testing Perspective Wiki.
So, instead of beating myself up over a perfect article, I put up a short piece on the Testing Perspective Wiki, titled Fundamental Strategies in Software Testing.
Is is perfect? Certainly not! Why, it doesn't even have references yet. Have I missed a few common strategies? Probably. That is where you come in - you can create an account on the wiki, sign in, add or change content to make this a stronger article. Or add new articles to make it a stronger reference.
In fact, the Testing Perspective Wiki is basically a clean slate. Besides a couple of articles, the whole wiki is open.
So please, check out my little piece on Fundamental Strategies ... then leave your own.
If the 1,000-odd monthly readers of this site were to each write one page of text on testing and review two more, we'd essentially have created a book for the community.
Wouldn't that be a nice thing to do for the world?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hi Matt,
Thanks for blogging about the Testing Perspective Wiki and making the first contributions to it in the form of two articles.
You have put the whole theme behind the creation of this wiki in a very clear and concise manner. This wiki is created so that if a person has an idea and even a sentence or two in his mind, he can start writing. Wikis help in creating standard HTML contents through very easy syntax and as you pointed out, they have some great features like version management,diffing two versions to see the changes, and making an article an ongoing story, rather than a static article requiring patch work.
We all are so unique in the way we think about solutions to common problems, in the exposure we have and in the kind of projects we deal with. It is becoming more and more obvious that there are multiple opinions about every single aspect of software testing. The idea of Testing Perspective Wiki is to put all the ideas, without favoring any, in a single place, let the readers have access to all opinions and form one of their own. No solution is the best solution to every problem or even to the same problem at a different time and in a different context. So, let's build a knowledge pool of different solutions to the common set of problems that a software tester comes across.
I am sure that a lot of readers of your blog will get inspired by your blog post and even more than that, by the first steps that you taken towards writing articles for this wiki.
Let's all make this literature a success and make it visible and useful to more and more sections of the software testing world.
Thanks,
Rahul Verma
Site Admin, Testing Perspective
FAQs on Software Testing, QA, Automation and Certification at softwaretesting-faq.blogspot.com
http://www.testingperspective.com/tpwiki/doku.php?id=fundamental_strategies
This link is broken - seems to be
http://www.testingperspective.com/wiki/doku.php?id=fundamental_strategies
thanks man. These sorts of links, especially on a wiki, tend to get stale quickly. I appreciate it.
Post a Comment