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...

I've been neglecting my blog, mostly because I have been doing a whole lot of professional freelance writing on the subject of software dev and test, and really enjoying it a lot. A few months ago I also submitted a piece to the Mountain Gazette , one of my favorite magazines, available for free around the West. They always publish really good writing. Mountain Gazette was soliciting pieces on the subject "My Favorite Mountain". To their surprise, they got more than 200 submissions, of which they could only publish 11. I submitted a piece, it was rejected, but I don't mind, I've been reading the issue, and there are some really great essays. So since it isn't going to appear anywhere else, I figured I would publish it here: ---- I don't have very far to go to get to my favorite mountain. I go out my front door and take a right, and I walk about a mile through my neighborhood of mostly middle-class houses, some Victorian, some like mine vintage 1930s-40s...

On May 20 and 21 some of the brightest people in the field of software testing met in Durango Colorado for the first ever Writing About Testing conference. We participated in a diverse set of activities: formal presentations, ad-hoc demonstrations, collaborative exercises, lightning talks, and informal discussions of topics of interest that ranged from the role of media, to finding the time to write. I started my software testing career in the bad old days of the mid-1990s. Both Open Source software tools and agile methods were highly controversial at the time. And while many of us were doing amazing and innovative work, the entrenched culture of software development was highly skeptical that what we were accomplishing was valid, or even sane. I think there is a real danger of a return to those days, and I wanted to create a community where people working out on the edges of software creation could hone their ideas in a supportive community, and from what I saw at w-a-t, that commu...

For a number of years I've been writing about treating great software development as a very specialized subspecies of the performing arts. Some time ago I reviewed a piece of writing from a software person inspired by the concept of artistic software, but who had no background in the arts at all. It showed: the most egregious error was that instead of using the term "performing arts", this person used the term "performance art". The rest of the piece was earnest but the author's lack of expertise (in art, not in software) was painfully obvious. The performing arts are music, theater, and dance. Performance art, on the other hand, can be dangerous stuff. But artistic software development is only a minor representative of a number of new concepts in the field bubbling madly just behind the zeitgeist. For example, methods of harnessing immense amount of data in order to make them comprehensible to human beings are about to change all of our lives, both in...

Depending on how you define the term, I have been on at least five and as many as seven agile software teams. Two were brilliant; two were poisonous; the rest were just flaky. A big part of the poison stems from not understanding how to do agile estimation. This is part of a message that showed up on a mail list I lurk on: I'm working with a team that does great work. They are skilled and work well together. They also average about 50% or less in meeting their sprint commitments. And don't seem to mind. "There's a lot to do we just didn't get to it all." "We'll do that in the next sprint." "Yeah, that's not working yet." These are the kinds of statements during the sprint or in the retrospectives. How do I help this team look at the problem to solve it, instead of just living with it? Since the list name has the word "Scrum" in it, I will assume this person is a Scrum Master. The first misunderstanding here is to know t...