Book review, The A word by Alan Page

 
Alan "Angryweasel" Page published a book some months ago about software testing automation, you can find the book here at leanpub and even that you can download it for free, you can also pay something for it as the incomes will go to the American cancer society.

In my case, I though that the price of a couple of beers was good enough, but after reading the book twice, I think it went a bit cheap for my side.
 
What is the book like... it's a tiny 58 page book that can be read in two hours if you feel like doing so. It is written in plain English with articles extracted from his blog that have been edited and updated.
 
What can you get out of it... some simple ideas about automated test design and that you should automate all of what you should automate, understanding how your automated test suite smells, and things to consider when doing test design.
 
Who should read this book... if you know what automated software testing is about, if you think you know what automated software testing is about, or if you don't know what is the difference between these two, you should read the book.
 
Some quotes I liked:
 
"Good testers test first – or at the very least they think of tests first. I think great testers (or at least the testers I consider great) first think about how they’re going to approach a testing problem, then figure out what’s suitable for automation, and what’s not suitable. I say that like it’s easy – it’s not."
 
"As software testers, our job is to test software. That probably sounds stupid (it sounds stupid to me as I type it), but test automation is just one tool from our tester toolbox that we can use to solve a specific set of testing problems."
 
"When designing tests, it’s important to think about how automation can (or won’t) make the testing more efficient."
 
"Designing good tests is one of the hardest tasks in software development. That’s worth saying again."
 
"Your job as a tester is to test software and not to create the largest test suite known to humankind."
 
"Automation is overused and overvalued in software – while the coding of diagnostic and analysis tools is extremely undervalued."

The very first day this book came out +Michael Larsen blogged the full book review on his blog, just three hours later, in the fastest book review I've ever seen, but just as Mr Miagi did not ask Daniel-san to use a waxing machine, I still feel like trying my own review.
 

The trip to Brighton

I just went to Brighton to meet Michael Bolton and his one day Rapid Software Testing for Managers training course, Let me tell you how this happened.

Back in August I was thinking about getting to Eurostar, you know, Europe's most important testing conference, this years programme is impressive, but important and expensive have quite similar meanings.

As I have a budget with a limit, I found out that the whole conference was quite too much for me, but maybe I could go to the tutorials, after all, James Bach was going to talk about Rapid Test Management And Pradeep Soundararajan was going to talk about Context Driven Mind Mapping, exciting tutorials, just a bit important for me.

But then I had to get there, and here I found another learning, that the world is divided in levels of travel expenses.
The first level, is where I can get by train or by a single low cost air ticket, so, since I live in Valencia (Spain), cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Malta, London, Paris… are places that are easy to get there.
Next level is where I need to get two low cost air tickets, and flying to Gothemburg was on the next lever, then book some hotel room and plan some cash for expenses as lunch and dinner… It could not be done.

Then Rosie published at The Ministry a training course, in Brighton, with Michael Bolton about Rapid Software Testing for Managers in one day for 200 GBP, it sounded quite similar to the tutorial James Bach was going to give, it might not be the same, but it was affordable, so there I went.

At the end, for the price of a low cost flight and a comfy hotel room for two nights, I got the chance to meet Michael and to know Rosie, Richard, Stephen and many other testers that got to the same place. 

We talked about testing, bugs, estimations, relationships, the reality steamroller, estimations, management, lack of management, lazy developers, estimations again, testers education, hiring testers, broken systems that works for somebody, Jerry Weinberg, more about estimations, the three reasons you need to justify bullshit, the testing vortex, how to write test reports, what a testing career looks like… and as it happens, things that were talked made me think about how I am delivering my work and how I can do better.

After the training we went to a pub for some beers, and after some talk and more beers I consider that it was good enough for me and headed back to the Hotel.

I see bugs...

I think the way to get out of Zombieland is by letting you curiosity grow and getting trained, and while some trainings are too important to get there, this does not mean that there is no way, people like Rosie are organizing small events like this one, and I feel proud of being able to join and support such initiatives.

Now I am thinking in a way to meet Pradeep... So, what's your plan?