How to keep up to date with the testing industry?

I recently spoke at UKStar 2018 and the team there asked me a few questions on how I keep up to date in Testing and the industry as a whole which I’ve reproduced here.

What is your favourite testing book/blog? Why is this your favourite?

Two books come to mind. The first is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This book is about how we make decisions and the fact that we are not really all that good at doing it, let alone realising what we are basing our choices on.

Secondly is the Freakonomics set of books by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Freakonomics is a great way to see how you can go about answering questions that seem impossible at first; but by using some more unconventional methods, you can answer almost anything.

What I enjoy about these books is that neither of them are about testing or software development but the questions that they both aim to answer are so relevant to the work we do.

How do you keep up to date with the software testing industry?

Whenever I’m asked this question it reminds me of what Martin Fowler always says to engineers when they ask him how do they become a better developer? His response is always  “understand the business that you work in”. So rather than focusing on testing I take a broader view and look at our industry as a whole.

I tend to follow a number of bloggers whose insight into our industry I have found invaluable.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery blog has some excellent indepth analysis on the software industry as a whole and how some of the larger organisations (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple etc) operate.

Benedict Evans weekly newsletter and Charles Arthur’s daily Overspill site are also great for finding technology focused articles from around the web that you probably would have missed, or never even come across, always with some illuminating commentary.

Twitter is a great source of information too. I tend to build up my feed by following people both inside and outside of the tech industry to get a broad range of ideas and influence.

What is the biggest misconception about testing that you’ve heard?

That automating all your testing will speed up the delivery of your products. A lot of teams still see testing as that bottleneck at the end of development stopping the release. So if you automate all your testing you will be able to ship faster.  

What they almost always fail to see is that their releases are either too big so the test team can’t isolate and feedback on the risky areas or they still see testers as simply running check lists against the product. Hence thinking that they can be replaced with automation. Tester’s always do so much more than this but their work has had a history of being boiled down to “Have all the tests passed”.