Testing Experience Issue 23, September 2013

Record card

What the links show

The September 2013 issue exists in the link record only under the issues-folder name, issues/testingexperience23_09_13.pdf, in three host and protocol shapes with thirteen referring domains and about 85 links between them. Three domains used the raw URL as anchor. The most distinctive linker is a press-release distribution site: a February 2014 release from a software vendor pointed at the issue with the anchor 'lengthy review', claiming that the magazine had reviewed its product at length. The anchor appears on three referring domains, the release and its syndicated copies.

A vendor review in a free trade magazine is ordinary; a vendor announcing it in a press release five months later says the review was favourable and the magazine's name carried weight in the market. This record notes the review's existence because the anchor establishes it. It does not name the vendor or the product, because this site does not carry vendor names in its guides and because the review's content is not in the data.

By late 2013 the magazine had moved all its files under the issues folder, so issue 23 has no root-level file name. The remaining linkers are tester blogs and community reading lists. The magazine had five issues left to run; the magazine hub covers how the run ended in December 2014.

The natural continuation for a reader interested in how testing tools are evaluated is the open source testing tools guide, which includes a ten-point evaluation checklist and a method for running a bake-off, and the test automation strategy guide, which covers the decision to buy, build or adopt.

Issue 23's link shapes show what a late-run issue looks like. There is no root-level name, only issues/testingexperience23_09_13.pdf in http, https and www variants, and the thirteen domains and 85 links on it are spread evenly: three domains on the raw URL, three on 'lengthy review' (the release and its syndicated copies), the rest on the magazine's name from tester blogs and reading lists. The press-release shape is distinctive because press-release distribution sites republish one release across several domains under the same anchor, exactly as the Spanish '4o Edicion' post did for issue 4. Counting the syndicated copies as one source, issue 23 has about eleven independent linkers, which is still above the run's median. The February 2014 date of the release is five months after publication, so the review was being cited while the issue was current.

A reader who followed the press release wanted to know what a magazine reviewer had concluded about a tool, and behind that, how to judge a tool for themselves. The open source testing tools guide replaces the review with a method: the ten-point evaluation checklist (release cadence, issue health, contributor spread, breaking-change discipline, documentation, language and platform fit, CI integration, extensibility, licence compatibility and exit cost), then the section on how to run a bake-off, which puts two finalists against the same subset of your own suite for a fixed period. For a commercial tool the same checklist applies with licence cost in place of licence family, and the test automation strategy guide's candidate scoring table (six areas, four axes, each 1 to 5) decides what the tool will be asked to do before any tool is chosen.

How tools were evaluated changed between 2013 and 2026 more than the tools did. In 2013 a review in a trade magazine, a vendor demonstration and a proof of concept were how a test manager formed a view, and a favourable review was worth a press release. Since then the evidence moved to sources a team can check itself: public issue trackers, release histories, contributor graphs and the licence text, which is why the guide's checklist reads those rather than a reviewer's opinion. The Open Source Definition still draws the line between open source and source-available licences, a distinction that has mattered more since 2018 as several widely used projects changed licence. A review is still useful as a starting list; a bake-off on your own suite is the decision.