Testing Experience Issue 3, September 2008

Record card

What the links show

The September 2008 issue was published as testingexperience03_08.pdf and later mirrored as issues/testingexperience03_09_08.pdf. The root file carries eleven referring domains and 58 links, the mirrored copy one more. Four domains used the raw URL as the anchor; the rest linked it from posts about the magazine in general. The most distinctive linkers are Portuguese: a Brazilian testing blog published a summary of the issue (the anchor translates as 'September edition') and pointed readers at the file with the word 'here'. The same blog family produced a small theme index for the magazine (metrics, test automation, open source tools, performance testing, advanced test techniques, test domains), which is the closest thing to a table of contents that the link record preserves for any issue.

Because that Portuguese index is not tied to individual issues in the anchor data, this record does not attach a theme to issue 3. What it can say is that by the third issue the magazine had a readership in Brazil and Portugal strong enough to generate summaries, and that the summaries drove downloads. The file was still being linked in 2010 and 2011 from tester community pages that listed magazines worth reading.

The two file names are the first appearance of the naming problem that runs through the archive. In 2008 to 2010 the publisher numbered files by quarter within the year (03_08 for the third file of 2008); from 2010 it switched to a running issue number with month and year (11_09_10). When the older issues were mirrored into the issues folder they were renamed to the new scheme, so issue 3 is 03_09_08 there: issue 3, September, 2008. Every one of those shapes now redirects to this page.

A reader who followed a 2008 link to issue 3 was looking for practitioner writing on testing in general. The Testing Techniques hub and the Test Management hub are where that reader should go now; the issue index lists every issue with its link record.

In detail, the anchor data for issue 3 splits three ways. Four domains pasted the raw URL, www.testingexperience.com/testingexperience03_08.pdf, as its own anchor. The Brazilian blog used the Portuguese phrase for 'September edition' on its summary post and the word 'here' (in Portuguese) on the download link, which is why the issue's anchor list contains a single function word with its own referring domain. The rest linked from posts about the magazine as a title, with the magazine's name as anchor. Nearly every link points at the root file; the mirrored issues-folder copy has one domain. Twelve domains and 59 links is a middling count for the run: eight issues have more, and the file's links were still being added in 2011 by community reading lists, three years after publication, which is longer than most issue files stayed in circulation.

A reader who clicked the September 2008 link was, on the evidence of the linking posts, a tester looking for a magazine to read rather than an answer to one question. The nearest current equivalent to browsing an issue is the Testing Techniques hub, and 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 wanted numbers to report, the software testing metrics guide lists twelve metrics with formula, healthy range and what each hides in a single table, and the test strategy guide fits the whole approach on one page under seven headings.

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.