Testing Experience Issue 19, September 2012

The issue and its place in the run

The issue. Issue 19 of Testing Experience was published in September 2012, the third issue of the magazine's fifth year. Testing Experience was a free quarterly magazine in English for professional testers, issued as a PDF by a Berlin testing consultancy and training company and edited by Jose Diaz, and it was free to read after registration. By September 2012 it had appeared every quarter since March 2008, and it had nine issues left to run before it ended with issue 28 in December 2014.

Where it sits in the run. The contents of this issue are not covered here, so its neighbours have to give the context. The years from 2009 to 2011 were the magazine's era of clearly themed issues: security testing in June 2009, agile testing in September 2009, open source testing tools in December 2010 and a guest editorial associated with Gojko Adzic in December 2011. Issue 19 belongs to the final stretch, 2012 to 2014, which closed with a mobile testing issue. Around the magazine the publisher also ran a sister title on IT security, Security Acts, and a series of Knowledge Transfer tutorials for practitioners.

Continuous integration, 2012 to 2026

Testing practice in 2012. 2012 is when continuous integration went from a developer practice to something test teams had to design for. Most teams with a build server ran unit tests on every commit; fewer had worked out what to do with the slower tests that testers owned. Acceptance suites ran overnight, if at all. Performance tests ran once before a release, on an environment booked weeks ahead. Security testing was a separate engagement with its own report. The questions a test manager faced were practical ones: which tests can run on every commit, which can wait for a nightly build, who is allowed to ship when a gate fails, and how long the team will wait for an answer before it stops waiting.

How it changed by 2026. Martin Fowler's Continuous Integration article, in the 2006 revision that most teams read, described a build that ran on every commit with the unit tests included; by 2012 that was common, and the open question was whether acceptance, performance and security tests could be brought into the same pipeline. The answer this site's guides give, that each kind of test runs at the earliest stage that can host it inside a fixed time budget, is the 2026 consensus, and Fowler revised the article again in 2024 to reflect it. The magazine itself belonged to the older rhythm: a quarterly PDF was a sensible cadence for professional reading in 2012, and it is a cadence no delivery team would accept for its test results now.

Where to read about it now

Where to read about it now. The continuous testing guide is the current answer to the 2012 design problem. Its Table 1 lists five pipeline stages with the tests that run at each, a wall-clock time budget and the gate rule that says who may override a failure, and its section on keeping the commit stage under 10 minutes deals with the constraint a 2012 team most often broke. For the load side, the performance testing guide covers the test types and how to report them. The test strategy guide's automation stance section fixes the team's policy in one paragraph, so that the pipeline reflects a decision rather than a habit.

The rest of the archive. The issue index lists all 28 issues with their dates and, where known, their themes. For current material, the guide hubs carry the magazine's subjects forward: Test Management, Test Automation, Agile Testing, Testing Techniques and Testing AI Systems. This site does not distribute the original issues; if you hold a copy of issue 19, cite it as Testing Experience, issue 19, September 2012, with an Internet Archive capture if you have one.

Then and now

Guides that continue this subject

• Test AutomationContinuous testing: which tests run where in the pipeline
• Testing TechniquesPerformance testing: types, workload models and p95 results
• Test ManagementTest strategy: the one-page version that actually gets used

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