Record card
- Issue
- 1 of 28
- Published
- March 2008
- Original file names
testingexperience01_08.pdf,issues/testingexperience01_03_08.pdf,testingexperience01_08_Black.pdf,testingexperience01_08_McQuaid.pdf,testingexperience01_08_schaefer_rus.pdf,testingexperience01_08_995.pdf- Referring domains
- 21 (summed across URL shapes)
- Theme as cited
- Launch issue; test management articles
- Citing context
- a Rex Black article file and a Hans Schaefer article distributed in Russian were linked separately
- Available here
- No. The original PDF is not distributed by this site.
What the links show
The March 2008 file exists in the link record under six names. The whole issue was testingexperience01_08.pdf at the site root and later issues/testingexperience01_03_08.pdf. Three article-level files were linked on their own: one carrying the surname Black, one carrying the surname McQuaid, and one marked schaefer_rus, a Russian-language version of a Hans Schaefer article that a Balkan software-testing site linked with the note that it was an article in Russian, as a PDF. A fourth variant, _995, appears once. Together the six names account for about 21 referring domains, which makes the launch issue the second most linked issue in the run after issue 4 and issue 12.
The Rex Black file was picked up by a personal collection blog with a very high authority score and by several tester blogs, always with the bare file name as the anchor. That pattern (a URL pasted as its own anchor) is typical of 2008 to 2010 blogging and tells us the linkers were sharing a download rather than reviewing the content. The anchors say nothing about the article's argument, so this record does not claim to know it. What can be said is that the launch issue leaned on established names in test management, and that a Portuguese quality blog announced the magazine's arrival in 2008 with a link to the homepage rather than to the file.
The launch issue set the format the magazine kept for seven years: quarterly, English, free after registration, roughly 60 to 90 pages, with a mix of practitioner articles, columns and sponsor pages. The registration wall is why subscribe.php collected 17 referring domains of its own; a document-sharing site even mirrored the first issue and linked the subscribe page as its source. If you arrived here from one of those links, the PDF is no longer distributed by this site, and the magazine hub explains what replaced it.
Because the launch issue was about test management in the broad sense (the surnames in the file names belong to authors known for test process and test management writing), the guides that continue its ground are the software test process guide, which also recovers a separate PDF associated with one of those authors, and how to write a test plan.
The link shapes for issue 1 differ from every later issue in one respect: the article-level files. testingexperience01_08_Black.pdf, testingexperience01_08_McQuaid.pdf and testingexperience01_08_schaefer_rus.pdf follow the whole-issue name with a surname suffix, a pattern the publisher never repeated. Of the 21 referring domains, most link the whole-issue name; the Black file drew the highest-authority link (the personal collection blog) and the Russian Schaefer file drew the Serbian site. The anchors are the file names themselves or a phrase describing a Russian PDF; not one anchor quotes an article title. The linkers are English, Portuguese, Serbian and Korean tester blogs plus a document-sharing mirror, and there are no forum or mailing-list links, which separates issue 1 from issue 6 and issue 12, whose links came from communities outside testing blogs.
A reader who followed one of those links in 2008 wanted practitioner writing on running a test effort: how to plan it, what documents to produce and how to report. The software test process guide answers the first part with its six-activity table (inputs, main activities, deliverables and exit criteria for each activity, from planning to completion), and its section on the process in a two-week sprint covers what a 2008 reader would have called the waterfall-to-agile question. The test plan guide answers the second with a ten-section fill-in template keyed to IEEE 829 section numbers and mapped to ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3, followed by seven steps from fixing the scope to reviewing twice and baselining. Figure 1 in that guide budgets about 12 hours for a first full draft of a release-level plan.
The test management practice the launch issue's authors are associated with has been re-standardised since 2008. IEEE 829-2008 was published that year and was the document standard a 2008 test manager cited; it has since been superseded by ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, whose parts on test processes (29119-2) and test documentation (29119-3) were first issued in 2013 and revised in 2021. The ISTQB Foundation syllabus a 2008 reader would have studied was the 2007 edition; the current syllabus is version 4.0, released in 2023, and it organises the test activities as planning, monitoring and control, analysis, design, implementation, execution and completion, the same activities the test process guide uses. The vocabulary moved. The underlying job of deciding what to test, in what order, and how to prove it was done has stayed where the launch issue's authors left it.
This record states only what the sites that link the issue establish. Nothing is asserted about the issue's contents beyond that. If you wrote for the magazine or hold a copy of the issue, the contribute page explains how to extend the record.
Common questions
Is the March 2008 issue of Testing Experience available for download here?
No. This site is an independent relaunch and does not distribute the original PDFs. The record above documents the file names so that old links resolve to an accurate description instead of an error page.
Why does issue 1 have six different file names?
The publisher hosted the whole issue and, unusually, three individual articles as separate PDFs at the site root, then later mirrored the issue under an issues folder. A sixth variant with a numeric suffix appears once and was probably a re-upload.
Who wrote for the launch issue?
The file names establish an article by Rex Black, one by an author named McQuaid, and one by Hans Schaefer that was also distributed in Russian. The full table of contents is not recoverable from the link record, so no other author is attributed here.
What do the referring domains for issue 1 look like?
About 21 domains across the six file names: tester blogs in English, Portuguese, Serbian and Korean, a personal collection blog, and a document-sharing mirror. Nearly all used the file name itself as the anchor text.
Which current guide replaces the issue for a reader who wanted its content?
The test process guide and the test plan guide in the Test Management hub cover the ground the launch issue's known authors are associated with, written for current practice rather than 2008.