Book Review – Beautiful Testing
After several months of this book sitting on my “To Read” queue, I finally took the time to read some of the essays within the O’Reilly compilation book, “Beautiful Testing.” The essays are grouped into one of three categories, “Testers”, “Process”, or “Tools. I found the group of essays around Testers to be the most interesting as the essays focused more on the testing and Software Quality Assurance community as a whole rather than actually the implementation of testing processes and tools.
The first essay, “Was it good for you?” by Linda Wilkinson focuses on the need for a quality assurance program that balances the needs of software testing but not at the expense of the overall project. The author warns against making the quality assurance engineer as the gatekeeper of the project as in many cases it is not cost effective to fix every bug identified within an application. I have personally seen the use of testers as gatekeepers in many organizations. Often the development teams find routes that go around a difficult process to avoid testing when the process itself is too structured and rigorous.
Overall, I would recommend reading “Beautiful Testing” to any Project Manager, Software Development Manager, or QA Engineer. The insights found in this compilation are certainly worth taking back to your own organization to implement cautiously.