Beautiful Testing
A collection of 23 essays that present a variety of views ontesting by people heavily involved in that aspect of program creation.
My Rating: 
Pros
- Presents some interesting looks into how the testing process works.
- Real world examples by real world testing staff.
- All profits donated to charity
Cons
- Each chapter is a separate essay all written independently so there is no real connection between the chapters apart from the book title.
Description
- First Edition: October 2009
- 329 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly Media
- ISBN: 978-0-596-15981-8
- Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software
- Edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher
Review
I found this book to be a rather interesting mix of chapters that were exteremely interesting an enlightening as well as some that were of no interest whatever. Of course which chapters I found interesting and which chapters others find interesting could be completely different. The book should have something in it of interest to anyone who has any sort of interest in the testing process.
The one theme that does run throughout the book is how testing is an art rather than a science (but then so is coding). For those who haven't had much exposure to testing it will demonstrate how there is much more to testing than just defining a few basic tests and running them.
This book isn't going to teach someone how to test but it may help expand your view of testing. While those who wrote the chapters do not all agree on exactly what testing is they all consider it to be of much wider scope than some people from outside of testing have considered it to be (a lot of people think testing and debugging are the same - which is completely false). That much is clear from some of the chapters that talk about where testers have become more involved earlier in the process than they had been previously and the impact that had on how they were able to handle the testing.
