Testing Experience Issue 7, September 2009

Record card

What the links show

The September 2009 issue was published as testingexperience03_09.pdf and mirrored as issues/testingexperience07_09_09.pdf. Fifteen referring domains link it. The highest-authority one is a 2011 post on a developer-platform company's engineering blog titled, in paraphrase, 'agile does not change testing: developers can just throw code over the wall to the test team', a deliberately provocative title for a post arguing the opposite. The post used the raw file URL as its anchor, which was the convention for citing a PDF at the time.

That citation is the best evidence of what issue 7 contained: an argument about the role of testers on agile teams, strong enough that a developer blog reached for it two years later. The anchor data cannot tell us the article title or author, so this record stops at 'agile testing as cited'. Five domains used the bare URL as anchor and two used 'www.testingexperience.com/testingexperience03_09.pdf', the pattern of readers sharing the download.

Autumn 2009 is also when the magazine's publisher was organising an agile testing conference in Germany; the anchor 'Berlin on June 4-5' on the homepage belongs to that side of the business, and the Eclipse Testing Day wiki pages list the magazine as a media partner from 2011. The agile theme was not a one-off for the magazine; it ran through the later issues too, which is why the Agile Testing hub is one of the four guide hubs on this site.

For the reader who followed the developer-blog link, the role of the tester in agile teams takes up exactly that argument with the benefit of another decade of practice: what changes when a tester joins a cross-functional team, what does not, and the anti-patterns (mini-waterfall inside the sprint, tester as gatekeeper) that the 2011 debate was about.

The link-shape evidence for issue 7 is the clearest case in the archive of one authoritative citation carrying an issue's theme. Of fifteen domains, the developer-platform blog is the only one whose anchor sits inside an argument; the other fourteen are tester blogs and reading lists using the raw URL (five domains), the www-prefixed URL (two domains) or the magazine title. The root file testingexperience03_09.pdf holds nearly all of it; the mirrored issues/testingexperience07_09_09.pdf name was linked later by blogs that found the renamed file. The blog post is dated 2011, two years after publication, which is unusual: most issue links were made within months of release. A citation that arrives two years later, from outside the testing community, is stronger evidence of lasting content than a dozen download links made in the launch week.

A reader who clicked through from the 2011 post wanted an answer to one question: does a cross-functional team still need someone whose job is testing, and if so what does that person do all week? The tester role in agile teams guide answers it directly. Table 1 lists the tester's responsibilities against how each is handled in a phased project and in an agile team. Figure 2 breaks a tester's two-week sprint into hours and warns that if the exploratory bar shrinks below 8 hours, stories are shipping without a second pair of eyes. The section on anti-patterns names the two the 2011 post was arguing against: mini-waterfall inside the sprint and the tester as gatekeeper. The definition of done guide then shows how the testing items get written into the story, sprint and release layers so that the argument does not have to be repeated each sprint.

The agile practice around testers changed in specific ways between September 2009 and 2026. The Scrum Guide was first published in 2010 and revised in 2011, when 'commitment' became 'forecast' and the mandatory release and sprint burndown charts were dropped; the 2013 revision made the definition of done explicit as a shared artefact; the 2020 revision removed the separate 'development team' inside the Scrum team, so that a tester is simply a member of one team accountable for the increment. Crispin and Gregory's Agile Testing, published at the turn of 2009, was months old when issue 7 appeared and gave the community its quadrants and its whole-team vocabulary; More Agile Testing followed in 2014. The Agile Manifesto's principles have not changed since 2001. What changed is that 'throwing code over the wall' stopped being a serious position and became the anti-pattern the guide describes.