Chris McMahon's Blog

All of the questions about tester certification were answered many years ago. They exist and they cannot be made to unexist. The only remaining question on the subject is: how many tester certifications can be sold? And the answer to that question doesn't matter to anybody except the people selling the certifications. A while ago on the writing-about-testing mail list we did a little exercise to come up with some back-of-the-napkin estimates about the number of software testers in the world. We used US Department of Labor data and also some other public information about software employment worldwide. We also had access to some privileged information about magazine subscriptions. In addition, a number of us have done serious work in social networking, and we have some analytical tools from that work to help estimate. Using all of that, we came up with a pretty consistent estimate that there are probably around 300,000 software testers in the US, and maybe 3 million in the w...

The Second Writing About Testing Conference: Frontiers for Software Testing I am pleased to announce the call for papers for the Second Writing About Testing Conference to be held May 13 and 14 2011 in Durango Colorado. For more information about the original conference and the Writing About Testing mail list please see: http://chrismcmahonsblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/writing-about-testing-listconf-update.html http://chrismcmahonsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/cfp-peer-conference-writing-about.html Writing About Testing is a peer conference for those interested in influencing the public discourse on software testing and software development by writing and speaking on those subjects. The discussion revolves around blogging, giving presentations at conferences and user groups, and writing for established media outlets, both for pay and for other reasons. There will very likely be representatives from established media outlets attending. Having software writers and publishers talki...

I generally do not post links to pay-wall or registration-wall sites, but today I am sincerely happy and proud to publish a link to SearchSoftwareQuality.com . For each of the last twelve months, I have written at least two 1000-word articles for SSQ. In the last year, SSQ has published nearly forty individual pieces of mine, a book-size body of work. I am sure some of those articles are better than others, but I wrote every one to the best of my ability with all sincerity, and I truly believe that every one of those articles contains at least one interesting idea intended to help people working in software testing and software development. I would particularly like to thank my editors at SSQ, at first Jan Stafford, later Yvette Francino. The SSQ editorial staff is professional and efficient. Both Jan and Yvette have given me an enormous amount of freedom and encouragement over the last year, and it has been a real pleasure working with them both. I especially appreciate their tole...