Testing Experience Magazine: The Archive

What it was

Testing Experience described itself as the magazine for professional testers. It was published four times a year in English and distributed as a PDF that was free to read after registration. Its editor was Jose Diaz. The publisher was a Berlin testing consultancy and training company, which meant the magazine was written close to working practice: the people behind it spent their days running test projects and teaching testers, and the issues read that way. Twenty-eight issues appeared between March 2008 and December 2014, one each quarter, in March, June, September and December.

Issues

28

Run

March 2008 to December 2014

Cadence

Quarterly

The people

Most issues were built around a theme. The launch issue of March 2008 was about test management, with articles by Rex Black, an author named McQuaid and Hans Schaefer, whose article also appeared in a Russian translation. Issue 5 (March 2009) carried an interview on crowdsourced testing. Issue 6 (June 2009) was the security testing issue and included an article on the OSSTMM, the open source security testing methodology. Issue 7 (September 2009) took up agile testing and the argument over whether agile changes testing at all. Issue 11 (September 2010) carried a research article, issue 12 (December 2010) was devoted to open source testing tools, issue 16 (December 2011) had an editorial associated with guest editor Gojko Adzic, issue 23 (September 2013) ran a lengthy product review, and issue 28 (December 2014), the last, was about mobile testing.

The sister title and the tutorials

The same publisher launched a sister title for IT security, Security Acts, in late 2009, after the June 2009 security testing issue showed there was an audience for it; issues 3 and 4 of Security Acts are known to have existed, and the title served as media partner at a 2010 incident-response conference. The publisher also ran a series of practitioner tutorials under the name Knowledge Transfer, one of which, on agile program management, was offered in early 2011, and it acted as media partner to community events such as the Eclipse Testing Day.

• Sister titleSecurity ActsThe IT security title the publisher launched in 2009.
• TutorialsKnowledge TransferOne-day tutorials the publisher ran alongside the magazine.

Why it is remembered

Testing Experience bridged communities that rarely read each other. Its security issue put a formal security testing methodology in front of functional testers who had never been asked to think about attack surfaces. Its agile issue gave space to the question of whether testers still had a distinct job on a cross-functional team, at the moment many teams were finding out. Its open source tools issue reached test teams that could not buy commercial tools and needed to know what was usable. And because it was free and in English, it was read by testers far outside Germany, many of whom had no local testing publication of their own.

Publication ended with issue 28 in December 2014; this site is an independent knowledge base, started in 2026, that is not connected to the original publisher. There is no subscription; the original issues are not distributed here. The issue index lists all 28 issues by number and date, and twelve of them have their own pages. The Knowledge Transfer page describes the tutorial format and how to run one in-house, Security Acts covers the sister title and the bridge it built to security testing, and recommended reading lists the books, standards and communities still worth a tester's time.

The five guide hubs continue the magazine's themes rather than its format. Test Management takes up the launch issue's ground: test process, test plans, risk-based testing, estimation and TMMi. Test Automation continues the open source tools theme of issue 12 and covers automation strategy and continuous testing. Agile Testing continues the argument about testers on agile teams from issue 7 and the ground of Gojko Adzic, the guest editor of issue 16, who is best known for specification by example. Testing Techniques holds security testing (the OSSTMM article of issue 6 and the Security Acts bridge), mobile app testing (issue 28) and the classical design techniques. Testing AI Systems has no precedent in the magazine; it applies the same discipline of evidence, base rates and confidence intervals to components that learn, which did not exist as a testing problem in 2014.

Each issue page says what the issue was and when it appeared, what it covered as far as that is known, what testing practice looked like at the time, and how that practice has changed by 2026. It then names the guides on this site that carry the subject forward and what each one gives the reader. Where the contents of an issue are not known, the page says so plainly and writes about the period instead. Nothing on this site claims to reproduce an article, and no table of contents is invented; if you hold an original issue, it remains the authority on what was printed.