Survey: Education for Testers
Fill in the survey to help the software testing community understand the status of education in the testing world.
As a thank you we will be giving away an annual subscription of The Testing Planet to 5 lucky winners.
[Sorry, survey now closed. Results have been published!]
WOW! experience
Thank you for empowering testing, I want to spread the knowledge in my city, you may advise?
It will be interesting to read how other testers go about improving and how they approach (self) education. There are just so many ways (these days).
@Stephan we do have an article on Self Education in the next edition of The Testing Planet
Testing is a complex process, often based on observation.
The Dalai Lama wrote a while back that our scientific world is based on logical empiricism, we observe, we hypothesize, we test, and so on…
But our ability to observe is imperfect. Computers run so fast, that events we would be concerned about occur faster than our eyes can see. During the heyday of the DOS based PC, poorly trained designers would throw together a PC with disregard for important timing issues, but would sell the machines on the basis that, “It boots up DOS, so it is OK”. These machines often failed quickly due to bus conflicts that destroyed the transistor in the chips.
Also is the issue that software (and hardware for that matter), can operate with the appearance of correctness 1000 times, and fail on the 1001th test. Truth be told, it is hard to say more than It appears to be working.
Professional testers do their best by exercising all documented functions and verifying that outputs are correct. Down deep in the software and hardware, a world of interrupts are occurring and depending on the skill of the software engineer, the interrupt routines (often nested) are subject to timing issues, and issues about re-entrancy.
I have occasionally told clients that I have tested the product to the best of my ability and it appears to be bug free and should work perfectly, unless it doesn’t. Some clients have more humor than others, and few understand the limitations of the testing process.
I would like to read this magazine to see how other testers approach to take knowledge and improve in their domain.
I would like to fill in the survey….. but have trouble finding it….. where is the survey @? (I probably will feel stupid once explained where it is but i’m completely in the dark here…)
@emile You should be able to see the survey on this page. If not try this link – http://softwaretestingclub.wufoo.com/forms/education-for-testers/
@Rosie Sherry. Thought I’d take this opportunity to say; I appreciate all the really cool work you do for the testing community.
Thanks Sue! Nice comments always appreciated.
Rosie, great idea…congratulations!
@Heba,
What do you mean by “empowering testing”? Can we express ourselves clearly without resorting to buzzwords? Thanks.