Recommended sources
Last updated: October, 2024
Testing newsletters
- Software Testing Weekly. I like to say that this newsletter is like a good weekly mini-conference providing interesting food for thoughts regularly. I have found a lot of good articles and authors to follow just because of subscribing to this newsletter. Dawid Dylowicz, keep up the good work!
Other (not-so-good, but) notable mentions:
- Ministry of Testing Newsletter. That would be my #2 option behind Software Testing Weekly as MoT provides different content, but in my opinion, the balance of social vs. technical topics is more to the social side.
- Coding Jag powered by LambdaTest. The content is very similar to Software Testing Weekly, yet promotes some of their own articles in the mix.
Other quality blogs and podcasts
- Jeff Nyman. Worth following on LinkedIn as he shares his own blog posts there and engages in comments sharing detailed and insightful thoughts.
- TesterStories.com. One of my favorite blogs that provides detailed articles with exact specifics and/or actionable advice, models, and rules of thumb.
- Lina Zubytė
- Quality Bits podcast. A well-balanced (between social and technical topics) podcast with interesting guests (the experts in their fields).
- Charity Majors.
- Ingo Philipp. Energetic and charismatic presenter sharing nice insights on software quality and testing.
Modern Testing & DevOps
- Alan Page.
- AB Testing podcast (with Brent Jensen). One of the best podcasts about testing and quality (“which isn’t all that modern, and not really about testing - except when it is”). If you are not a fan of not-so-small small talk, you may need to fast forward some of the beginnings, but the later parts are definitely worth it.
- Modern Testing principles (or a longer article - Modern Testing Principles Explained)
- Modern Testing resources
- Quality Culture Transition Guide. A great resource to evaluate/self-assess your team’s/org’s practices and culture in the context of Modern Testing.
- The Weasel Speaks substack. BTW, Alan is well known as an “angry weasel”.
- Bryan Finster. A “value stream architect” advocating practices that are really similar to Modern Testing school. Worth following on LinkedIn as he often writes insightful posts and comments.
- John Willis. An amazing author, tech historian, one of the fathers of the DevOps.
- What DevOps Means to Me. Cornerstones of DevOps - Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing - explained as they were understood in 2010.
- Deming to Devops: The Science Behind Devops
- Devops and Dr Deming’s 14 Points
- “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” (book)
- William Edwards Deming. “Grandfather of quality”. Many modern testing and quality ideas can be traced back to Deming’s principles from the 1950s-1990s.
Holistic Testing
- Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
- Agile Testing Fellow. Their courses and some material around Holistic Testing.
- LisaCrispin.com. “Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin”
- JanetGregory.ca. “Janet Gregory: Agile Consultant, Trainer, Advisor, Writer, Speaker”
- The first article on Holistic Testing. Classics.
- Assessing Agile Quality Practices with QPAM. A nice book provides a model (derived from the Modern Testing Quality Culture Transition Guide) for quality assessments within agile teams.
Rapid Software Testing
- Michael Bolton
- DevelopSense
- DevelopSense resources. It navigates the reader through various testing topics and provides helpful resources along the way.
- DevelopSense
- James Bach
- Satisfice
- Satisfice resources. Focus on the thinking process and its structure from various perspectives (see “A Tester’s Syllabus” mindmap).
- Rapid Software Testing.
- Satisfice
- Context Driven Testing. “The value of any practice depends on its context.”
Test Automation
- Bas Dijkstra. Worth following on LinkedIn as he shares a lot of smaller yet still insightful posts/thoughts there not related to his blog, courses, or articles.
- OnTestAutomation.com. Insightful blog, training, mentoring services, free public workshops, and more.
- Zhimin Zhan. He may sound opinionated, harsh, and uses a lot of “colorful” terminology, but he often makes great points and clarifies complex things with straightforward language.
- Joe Colantonio
- TestGuild News Show. A weekly wrap-up of interesting things happening around in the world of testing.
- Andrejs Doronins
Performance testing
- RAIL model. “A user-centric performance model that provides a structure for thinking about performance.” A long time ago I started my journey into performance testing topic from analyzing the RAIL model (and I still think it is pretty valid today). However, Core Web Vitals were introduced later, and now it seems as the right way to go.
- Core Web Vitals. “A newer initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web. It is the recommended approach for defining performance goals over RAIL.”
- Scott Moore. Sometimes Scott posts controversial stuff (and that is still interesting), but a lot of times he shares interesting news and resources related to performance testing.
- Leandro Melendez
API testing and security
- Zero Day Hacker. “Teaching myself ethical hacking. Here’s what I’ve learned, from day zero onward.” by Edward Lichtner.
Developer Productivity and Developer Experience (DX)
- Abi Noda
- Engineering Enablement newsletter. This is an amazing resource for keeping track of research papers about engineering, developer productivity, and developer experience as Abi provides nice summaries weekly.
- GetDX.com. Blog repeats the newsletter a little, yet provides more articles from other authors + a nice podcast.
- “The Pragmatic Engineer” substack
- “Measuring Developer Productivity: Real-World Examples”
- “Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey”. (Actually, I wrote Effort, Impact and Experimentation in Testing based mostly on this article.)
Product
- Marty Cagan. Author of “Inspired”, “Empowered”, “Transformed”, and other books around product management provides great resources on how to think about products. Check out his YouTube videos.
- Silicon Valley Product Group. Product management related content from Marty Cagan and team.
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
- Domain-Driven Design Crew · GitHub
- Event Storming
- Impact Mapping
- Wardley Mapping
Yearly reports, research
- Accelerate State of DevOps Report (DORA). Not only does it provide insightful findings, but it also describes all the methodology behind the research setting a nice example of how to treat your assumptions (learning opportunity?)
- DORA capability catalog. “Each of the articles below presents a capability, discusses how to implement it, and how to overcome common obstacles.”
- DORA community discussions. Interesting discussions captured as a YouTube playlist.
- The New Future of Work. Research by Microsoft.
- PractiTest State of Testing Survey. Well-designed survey providing interesting reports about the testing industry across various cross-sections such as personal information, education, training, testing practices in organization, and personal development.
- Future of Quality Assurance Survey powered by LambdaTest.
- Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a snapshot of tools, techniques, platforms, languages and frameworks based on the practical experiences of Thoughtworkers around the world.
Other (not-so-good, but) notable mentions:
- Capgemini World Quality Report. Shallow. Some questions (and especially their respective options) indicate the creators do not understand that deeply the field of quality, testing, competence development, etc.