Testing Experience Issue 10, June 2010

Record card

What the links show

The June 2010 issue appeared as testingexperience02_10.pdf (the second file of 2010) and was mirrored as issues/testingexperience10_06_10.pdf when the publisher renamed the back catalogue to the issue-month-year scheme. The root file has ten referring domains and 26 links; the mirror adds two. Three domains used the raw URL as anchor text. The linkers are tester blogs in English, Portuguese and Korean, a pattern that by 2010 had become the magazine's normal footprint: a European publication with a readership that translated and summarised it in Brazil and Korea.

The anchors do not attach a theme to this issue, and the Portuguese theme index (metrics, test automation, open source tools, performance testing, advanced techniques, test domains) is not tied to issue numbers in the data, so this record does not claim one. The issue's importance in the archive is structural: it marks the boundary between the two naming schemes, and every redirect rule for the 2008 to 2010 files depends on knowing that 0N_YY means the Nth quarterly file of year YY.

The conversion table is short. 01_08 is issue 1 (March 2008), 02_08 issue 2 (June), 03_08 issue 3 (September), 04_08 issue 4 (December); 01_09 to 04_09 are issues 5 to 8 (2009); 01_10 is issue 9 (March 2010) and 02_10 is issue 10. From September 2010 the files are numbered 11_09_10, 12_12_10 and so on. Every shape of every name is handled by the redirect rules on this site, so a 2010 bookmark still lands somewhere true.

For readers who arrive from a 2010 link, the two hubs the magazine covered most around this time are Test Automation (the open source tools theme of the following issue) and Testing Techniques. The issue index has the complete list.

The anchor evidence for issue 10 is thin and consistent. Three of the ten root-file domains used the raw URL, testingexperience02_10.pdf, as the anchor; the rest used the magazine's name or a phrase in the linker's own language announcing a new issue. The Korean blog's link belongs to a series of posts that linked several issues with a free-download note, so it tells us about the blog's habit rather than about this issue. The two domains on the mirrored issues/testingexperience10_06_10.pdf name are later links; nobody could have linked that name before the renaming, which dates those two links to 2011 or after. The 26 links from ten domains work out at two or three per domain, the profile of a post plus a category page, with no sitewide template links inflating the count.

A reader following a mid-2010 link was looking for the current issue of the magazine, and 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 wanted 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.

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. In June 2010 automation usually meant a nightly regression run against a shared environment, reported by email the next morning. 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 shape has stayed as the book drew it.