Testing Experience Issue 3, September 2008
Issue 3 of Testing Experience appeared in September 2008, the third quarterly issue of the magazine's first year. This page describes the period it belonged to and where its subjects are covered now.
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The issue. Testing Experience was a free, English-language quarterly for professional testers, published in Berlin by a testing consultancy and training company and edited by Jose Diaz. Issue 3 came out in September 2008, six months after the launch issue on test management and three months before the December issue that closed the first year. Like every issue, it was free to anyone who registered, and it reached testers well beyond Germany.
What it covered. The contents of this issue are not covered here. No account of its articles is available that this site can stand behind, so none are attributed to it, and no theme is claimed. What can be said is where it sat in the run: after a launch issue built around test management, and before the themed issues of 2009 to 2011 on security testing, agile testing and open source tools. In its first year the magazine was still finding its shape, and the September issue belongs to that period of a new title building a readership one quarter at a time.
The standard now defines each test design technique, and the guide applies it to a worked case with numbers.
Testing in 2008 and since
Testing in 2008. A tester reading in autumn 2008 most often worked in a separate test team that received a build after development and ran prepared test cases against it. Test design was taught from the ISTQB Foundation syllabus and from a handful of books, and the arguments of the day were familiar ones: how much black box testing was enough, whether testers should read code, how to choose test cases when there was never time to run them all, and which numbers to report to a project manager who wanted a single figure for quality. Automation existed but was usually a specialist activity bolted on after the manual tests were written. Exploratory testing was gaining ground as a named practice, and the context-driven school was arguing against heavy scripted documentation, so a reader in 2008 could find strong opinions on both sides of almost every question.
How the practice has changed. What has changed since 2008 is where the techniques a magazine article would have explained now live. In 2008 the test design techniques were taught from the ISTQB syllabus and from books; there was no international standard that defined them. ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-4, first published in 2015 and revised in 2021, now specifies equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables, state transition testing and the structural techniques with a shared vocabulary and coverage measures. An article that explained a technique from scratch has less reason to exist, and a guide that shows how to apply one with a worked example has more. That is the division of labour this site follows: the standard defines the technique and the guide applies it to a case with numbers.
Where to read about it now
Where to read about it now. The nearest current equivalent to browsing a general issue of the magazine is the Testing Techniques hub, together with the Test Management hub. The guide to start with is black box vs white box testing, whose first table compares the two on six planning dimensions and whose second gives illustrative defects found per tester hour by defect class. For the reader who needs numbers to report, the software testing metrics guide lists twelve metrics with formula, healthy range and what each hides, in a single table. The test strategy guide fits the whole approach on one page under seven headings.
Placing the issue. The original issue is not distributed on this site. If you hold a copy and want to cite it, give the magazine title, the issue number and the date: Testing Experience, issue 3, September 2008. The issue index lists all 28 issues in order, so you can see what came before and after it, and the issue pages for the launch issue and the December 2008 issue cover the rest of the first year.
Then and now
Guides that continue this subject
- Testing TechniquesBlack box vs white box testing: what each finds and misses
- Test ManagementTest strategy: the one-page version that actually gets used
- Testing TechniquesSoftware testing metrics: 12 formulas and what each hides
Questions
Can I read issue 3 of Testing Experience here?
No. This site does not distribute the original issues. This page describes the period the issue belonged to and points to current guides.
What did issue 3 cover?
The contents of this issue are not covered here, and no theme is claimed for it. It was the third quarterly issue of 2008, between the test management launch issue and the December issue.
Who published and edited the magazine?
A Berlin testing consultancy and training company published it, and Jose Diaz was the editor. It was free after registration.
How do I cite issue 3?
Give the magazine title, issue number and date: Testing Experience, issue 3, September 2008. If you hold an Internet Archive capture of the issue, cite that as well.
Where should I go for the kind of material the magazine carried?
The guide hubs on this site: Test Management, Test Automation, Agile Testing and Testing Techniques carry the magazine's themes, and Testing AI Systems applies the same methods to components that learn.
