Ten Software Testing Videos !

I came across these brainstorming videos while surfing through Rise Again's Blog ! These videos can be found for FREE on Google Video.

1. Becoming a software testing expert - 19954 views - 88 ratings
2. Beyond Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development - 16775 views - 86 ratings
3. Agile Testing - 3647 views - 34 ratings
4. Proving Our Worth: Quantifying the Value of Testing - 4425 views - 17 ratings
5. Literate Functional Testing - 3343 views - 15 ratings
6. How To Recruit, Motivate, and Energize Superior Test Engineers - 1359 views - 7 ratings
7. Exploratory Testing - 324 views - 2 ratings
8. Achievable Futures - 1,300 views - 5 ratings
9. Prospecting for Bugs - 1,208 views - 5 ratings
10. Find it yourself ! (A task for the readers)

James Bach’s video on Becoming a software testing expert. He defines software testing and its expertise in an inspiring way. He gives much coolness to software testing. What I liked best was the links he makes between testing and philosophy. Clearly, you should have a good critical thinking to be a tester. In theory, you doesn’t have to know about Descartes cartesianism or the skeptics school but that doesn’t hurt.

Dave Astel’s video on Beyond Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development. It’s not exaclty about testing but it’s a way to focus the development testing effort of Agile and Test Driven methodologies on the desired application behaviour.

Elisabeth Hendrickson’s video on Agile Testing. She explains how software testing teams should apply Agile. She provides an overview of how Agile practices differ from traditional practices. An interesting point is about XP methodology: showing to the customer the value given by the test specification reduces the development documentation effort (shorter requirements, shorter design and shorter test plan). A typical Agile testing iteration goes like this: automated acceptance of story tests, automated unit tests and manual exploratory tests.

Lee Copeland’s video on Proving Our Worth: Quantifying the Value of Testing. He defines his vision of software testing and gives good insights on the problematic of quantifying the value of testing. He proves that testing gives valueable information to the developers and to the client.

Tom White’video on Literate Functional Testing. The idea is to write tests that are understandable by the developers and the customers. It comes from Donald Knuth’s Literate Programming.

Jeff Feldstein’s video on How To Recruit, Motivate, and Energize Superior Test Engineers. He asserts that software testing is a better place for software developers than software development. He also gives a way to inspire more creativity in the test and development teams.

Jon Bach’s video on Exploratory Testing. He defines it as unscripted and improvisional testing. He compares this approach with the scripted approach.

James Lyndsay’s video on Achievable Futures. Over the last decade, we've seen huge changes in the ease and ubiquity of our access to information. We have vastly more power at our fingertips, and the technologies that provide that power have become commodities. However, software testing has failed to keep up with the times, and pressure is building that may lead to convulsive change. This talk looks at the unique potential of testing to provide crucial, but otherwise undiscoverable information in an otherwise impossible timeframe - and at the split that has appeared between testing focused on expectations, and testing focused on the delivered system. James Lyndsay believes that we can use our existing skills, approaches and tools to rise to these challenges, and reach a bright, but very different future.

Ross Collard’ video on Prospecting for Bugs. Testers' ability to identify, assess and prioritize risk is critical to having the right test focus. Objective, quantitative methods for risk assessment generally do not work well. And subjective, intuitive methods for risk assessments are derived as much or more from emotion and psychology rather than "logic". A possible new breakthrough is "prospect theory", which won the Nobel Prize in 2004 in Economics. This theory identifies the circumstances under which people are likely to overestimate or underestimate probabilities. It also shows how attitudes about risk affect behavior. The purpose of this presentation is to examine how we can use this work to improve our test effectiveness. I am confident you will find these ideas are applicable to your work, and can provide quick, tangible pay-off for your investment of an hour to hear this presentation.

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About Debasis Pradhan

Debasis has over a decade worth of exclusive experience in the field of Software Quality Assurance, Software Development and Testing. He writes here to share some of his interesting experiences with fellow testers.