Beautiful Testing

Preface

Adam Goucher

I don’t think Beautiful Testing could have been proposed, much less published, when I started my career a decade ago. Testing departments were unglamorous places, only slightly higher on the corporate hierarchy than front-line support, and filled with unhappy drones doing rote executions of canned tests.

There were glimmers of beauty out there, though.

Once you start seeing the glimmers, you can’t help but seek out more of them. Follow the trail long enough and you will find yourself doing testing that is:

• Fun

• Challenging

• Engaging

• Experiential

• Thoughtful

• Valuable

Or, put another way, beautiful.

Testing as a recognized practice has, I think, become a lot more beautiful as well. This is partly due to the influence of ideas such as test-driven development (TDD), agile, and craftsmanship, but also the types of applications being developed now. As the products we develop and the ways in which we develop them become more social and less robotic, there is a realization that testing them doesn’t have to be robotic, or ugly.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So how did we choose content for Beautiful Testing if everyone has a different idea of beauty?

Early on we decided that we didn’t want to create just another book of dry case studies. We wanted the chapters to provide a peek into the contributors’ views of beauty and testing. Beautiful Testing is a collection of chapter-length essays by over 20 people: some testers, some developers, some who do both. Each contributor ...