I came across this site which has a lot of great information: 97 Things Every Software Architect should know.  I particularly like this quote from Michael Nygard’s advice in Skyscrapers aren’t scalable:

We often hear software engineering compared to building skyscrapers, dams, or roads. It’s true in some important aspects.  The hardest part of civil engineering isn’t designing a building that will stand up once it is finished, but figuring out the construction process.

Lots of great stuff for software engineers in general.

Wow, it’s been a while since I last posted an entry – is that how blogging works or am I supposed to do it every day . Maybe it’s all the Olympics watching that’s been going on!

Anyhows, I was looking for some quality criteria in Testing…

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Travelling to the Share conference (share.org) in Orlando I’ve achieved something I have never done before. I started, and finished a book during the flight. And proudly it wasn’t a small book of pictures, it was a book on Software Testing.

Having previously not given it much attention, the book was laying around my office for a while. Recently, I was on the hunt for some information and rather than go straight to the mother of all search engines, I decided to be old-school and check out the books on my shelf.

Flicking through a few I stopped on one that gave me exactly what I was after. In fact, it appeared to me that within its contents were lessons that every Tester should be aware of. It hit me, “Where has this book been all my life?”.

The answer was easy; “Sitting on a shelf”. After all, the book which was written by Glenford J. Myers has been in publish for the last 30 years.

It’s called “The Art of Software Testing”.

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Why do we test software? This may seem an obvious question: everyone has at some point experienced the frustration of error-prone, or “buggy”, software. As software becomes increasingly pervasive in modern life, simple frustrations can quickly become much more serious. Just as traditional engineering disciplines involve testing of generated artifacts to ensure fitness for purpose, safety and durability, the same requirements are true for software, even though software engineering may seem abstract to a traditional engineer.

We are a group of senior software testers working in the IBM Hursley software labs in the UK. We work on large middleware projects, across multiple testing disciplines. This is an unofficial collection of our thoughts and ideas on software testing, based around our philosophy of risk-based testing. We want to share our ideas, and expand them based on other people’s thoughts. We feel that a blog is an ideal format for this: please contribute.

Arthur, Ben, Jon, Richard and Scott