Sources of Learning

Over at Jeroen Mengerink’s blog (and there’s the 1st of the sources to learn from) he talks about learning (and the lack thereof) of people in testing. Given the topic list of this blog “On Testing, Patterns and Learning”, this topic is very interesting to me, too.

I recently attended a Scrum Training and one of the group exercises was to suggest ways to implement certain practices we were given. One of the topics was “focus on both, technical excellence and good design, fosters agility” (my translation, the training was held in German). I started filling the spot for possible immediate actions on the board: Conferences, user group meetings, books, blogs, podcasts… at which point a colleague stopped me, so others could add to it. However they didn’t.

So, if you’re looking for information about testing here are some recommendations I have, for today let’s cover the letter ‘B’ 😉

• Books
  • “Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing” by Gerald Weinberg (he wrote a whole lot more about software, but one recommendation will do)
  • “Testing Computer Software” by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk, Hung Q. Nguyen
  • “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” by Cem Kaner, James Markus Bach, Bret Pettichord
  • “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
    This one is available as an ebook at informit.com
  • “Beautiful Testing — Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software” Adam Goucher, Tim Riley
  • “Specification by Example” by Gojko Adzic
• Blogs (my ‘blog roll’ list repeated, in no particular order):
  • Lisa Crispin
  • Satisfice
  • Elizabeth Hendrickson
  • Michael Bolton
  • Lean Software Development
  • Jon Bach’s blog

Jeroen also mentioned conferences and especially a presentation by Alan Richardson (@EvilTester on Twitter): Please go to Jeroen’s post and read it, then watch Alan’s presentation, both are really recommended stuff.

For now, I’d love to hear what book(s) and/or blog(s) you recommend that helped you learning about testing or improving your testing.