one of the books that influenced me most is, unfortunately, written in danish; it’s called - in translation - ‘The Book of Excuses’, written by Torbjørn Jørgensen. Besides listing 100 excuses each for a number of occasions, one of them being ‘Introducing new IT systems in an organisation’ (scarily, I’ve actually used some of the excuses myself.. erhmm..), it also emphasises one of the best learning sentences I’ve ever known: ‘if what you do doesn’t work, you need to do something else’..

Ahh - the sweetness of simple logic! In many stressful times this one has saved my day.

Cheers,
/Carsten :-)

Thanks Carsten,

I like, and have followed, that advice too.

However, plenty of sources have changed the way I, personally, have done things that are important to the way I test. Some of those have been books. For the sake of fun, and to put some distance between a book of methods and the approaches I use, I’m going to exclude systems thinking / engineering books from my list. I’m going to exclude, too, those books that have been recommended to me by others, and those that I remember recommending elsewhere.

I suggest:

- _An Urchin in the Storm_; Stephen J Gould’s courteous, witty and stern de-bunking of ideas held by other serious minds. Disguised as a collection of book reviews, it is a masterclass in how to marshal information and muster emotion to attack a non-trivial position. I think of Gould when I’ve got particularly unwelcome news.

- _101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life_; Roger-Pol Droit’s collection of exercises will help engineer (temporary) perspective shifts in your world-view. I find a shift in perspective can appear shortly before finding a collection of bugs - familiarising yourself with shifting your general perspective makes it simpler to achieve the same with testing.

- _Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge_; ideas from Deborah Mayo’s recent work around the idea of *methodology as avoidance of error* creeps into my construction of test strategies and infects my conversation with testers.

- _Principles of Experimentation and Measurement_ is out of print, but I believe that Gordon Bragg’s thin volume has been important to Physics education for years. I have no idea what the modern substitute is, but this cuts to the heart of our (ahem) profession. Reading it allowed me to return to the rigour and investigation of experimentation, and reminded me why I enjoy testing.

- _Flow_ by Mihaly Cskiszentmihalyi describes a state of mind that has played a part in what I feel is some of my better work. His book has allowed me to recognise - and sometimes arrive at - that state of mind. With a bit of luck, then, I am able to use it for my more important bits of testing work.

Apologies for the lack of amazon links.

Cheers - James

Thanks James, Great to see select subset of influential books. And don’t worry about the Amazon links… they don’t call me “Mr Affiliate Links” for nothing - oh wait, they don’t call me “Mr Affiliate Links” at all, but if they did then this would be why, lo… affiliate links.

I really like the intent behind flow and although I haven’t blogged about ’states’ yet on EvilTester I think I talked a little about states as a process in Lewt - so I shall add that to my ‘to blog’ list..

-adam

Michael did provide a huge list, so thanks for narrowing it down for me. Blink references out to some interesting research and I found it a short, enjoyable read. I have not heard of “The Art of Team coaching” so thanks for supplying that reference.

http://www.satisfice.com/rst-appendices.pdf

:)

Thanks for the reminder of James’ list.

The Design of Everyday Things - Donald A. Norman (a good refresher in usability vs aesthetics)

Getting Past No - William Ury (useful when negotiating with developers, management, and other members of the team)

-Nick

Thanks for the list Nick. I wrote a review of The Design Of Everyday Things over on CompendiumDev.co.uk.

1. How doctors think - Jerome Groopman - Incidently, Michael B introduced this book as being useful to testers (in software-testing - yahoo group)

2. Conjectures and Refutations - Karl Poper

3. How to solve it - George Poyla

Shrini

Thanks Shrini, I have not managed to get around to reading Karl Poper yet, but “How to Solve It” made it to my re-read list as I want to generalise it a little.

I also want to dedicate time to study Polya’s “Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning” because I think that if I can get my head around those 2 volumes then I’ll advance my thinking.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/MichaelBolton

The somewhat less general:

Read Weinberg! Read Weinberg!

The even less general:

Watch for Jerry’s new book, Perfect Software and Other Testing Myths, which will be launched at the CAST Conference in Toronto, July 14-16, 2008. See http://www.cast2008.org.

—Michael B.

Thanks for the lists Michael. I second the recommendation for Jerry Weinberg. I didn’t include him on the list because I knew recommendations for him would come from other testers, and given his popularity among testers, I would have had to caveat my title even further “books that some testers probably haven’t read but many will have heard of” which I didn’t think was punchy enough.

The normally recommended Weinberg reading list seems to include “Quality software Management” and “An Introduction to General Systems Thinking” so to this I’ll add some of his other books that I got a lot of value from: “Secrets of consulting”, “More Secrets of consulting”, “Becoming A Technical Leader”, “Psychology of Computer Programming” and “Rethinking Systems Analysis & Design”. You can’t really go wrong by picking up a Weinberg book to study.