Testing Experience Issue 10, June 2010

The issue and the magazine in 2010

The issue. Testing Experience was a free quarterly English magazine for professional testers, published in Berlin by a testing consultancy and training company and edited by Jose Diaz. Issue 10 is dated June 2010. It came after the themed issues of 2009, which included security testing in June and agile testing in September, and before the December 2010 issue on open source testing tools. The contents of this issue are not covered here: no theme for it is known, and this page does not guess at its articles or authors. What follows is about the period instead.

The magazine in 2010. By its tenth issue the magazine had settled into its pattern: four issues a year, free after registration, most of them built around a theme, with practitioner articles alongside. The publisher's sister title, Security Acts, launched in late 2009 after the June 2009 security testing issue, was in its first full year and carried the IT security subjects that the main magazine had opened; in 2010 it was a media partner at an incident-response conference. The September 2010 issue that followed included a research article, and the December issue turned to open source testing tools, so the second half of the year leaned towards tools and evidence.

Test automation, 2010 to 2026

Testing practice in mid-2010. In June 2010 test automation usually meant a nightly regression run against a shared environment, reported by email the next morning and maintained by a small specialist group. Test design was taught from the ISTQB syllabus, and test documentation followed IEEE 829. Agile adoption was spreading, and testers on Scrum teams were working out how a regression suite could keep pace with two-week sprints. The common questions were which areas to automate first, how to stop scripts breaking with every release, and how to show that the effort paid for itself.

How the practice changed, 2010 to 2026. Issue 10 appeared in the same year as Continuous Delivery, the book by Jez Humble and David Farley that made the deployment pipeline the organising idea for test automation, and the two can stand for the before and after. The pipeline model that book set out, in which unit tests run on every commit inside a fixed time budget and slower suites run in later stages against disposable environments, is now the assumption behind every automation guide on this site, including the stage-by-stage table in continuous testing. The tools have changed many times over; the pipeline itself has stayed as the book drew it.

Where to read about it now

Where to read about it now. Mid-2010 was when test automation moved from a specialist subject to something every team was expected to have a position on. The test automation strategy guide gives that position a method: its first table scores six candidate regression areas on frequency, stability, risk and manual cost, each 1 to 5, and automates the top three first. Its 12-month roadmap by quarter and its list of what not to automate are the parts a 2010 reader most needed and least often got. For the reader who wants a technique rather than a strategy, the equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis guide works one example, an age field accepting 18 to 65, through seven steps and a partition table.

The subject the magazine turned to at the end of 2010 is covered by the open source testing tools guide, which sets out tool categories, maturity signals and licence families, with a checklist for choosing between candidates. The two hubs that hold most of the material from this period are Test Automation and Testing Techniques. The issue index lists all 28 issues of the magazine with their dates, including the neighbouring issues of 2010.

Then and now

Guides that continue this subject

• Test AutomationTest automation strategy: what to automate and in what order
• Testing TechniquesEquivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis: worked example
• Test AutomationOpen source testing tools: categories, licenses and evaluation

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