Evil Tester

“What testing books should I read?” such a hard question to answer in a land where a testing book that has value at one point in your career ceases to have value later on.
I do have some books that I recommend to testers, entirely ignoring their context - ha… see… Eeeevil…
So… 5 books, […]

A title like that always makes an attractive proposition. Fergus O’Connell presents a simple system which involves doing more of the stuff you want to do and less of the stuff you don’t. Fergus present some NLP techniques, a bunch of questionnaires, some belief change exercises and some tips. It all adds up to a […]

I put my Software Testing Book reviews directly on my Compendium Developments site.
So if you only read Evil Tester then you missed out on Reviews of:

Effective Software Testing by Elfriede Dustin,
Software Testing Fundamentals by Marnie Hutcheson,
Testing Computer Software by Kaner, Falk, Nguyen,
Systematic Software Testing by Craig and Jaskeil,
Software Testing […]

I have done a lot of public talks over the years (but never enough to consider myself ‘good’ at it). Over the years I have adopted numerous approaches to constructing the presentation and of constructing the slides. You can see some of my worst slides. This slide pack seems better. But overall these slides […]

I love pulp novels. Particularly the hero pulps - The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Spider.
So when I saw “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril” on the bookshop shelf with its distressed cover and the sadly slightly camp depiction of Lester Dent (on the UK cover). I had to buy it. [amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

285 pages to tell me the ‘one’ thing I need to know? Obviously Marcus plans to tell me a little more than one thing. But the basic message behind this book seems to be “there are a few things good managers/leaders do, which prevent them from failing. But there is One thing that the […]

This can hardly form a particularly useful book review since “TQM - The Quality Makers” now resides in the ‘out of print’ category, but dedicated hunters of quality books can find 2nd hand copies. So the question becomes - should you bother?
[amazon.com][amazon.co.uk]

Joe has a problem: everyone wants more, and no-one wants to do more than the bare minimum. Joe can’t figure out what to do. He says "do a better job!" and they don’t, he says "if you don’t do a better job you’ll get sacked", they don’t do a better job, they get demoralised, […]

I got quite a lot out of reviewing the Responsibility Virus, but most of it not from the book. I recommend 2 papers from Roger Martin’s web page :

Breaking the code of change
Strategic Choice Structuring

Taken together, these two papers provide a complementary view of the information in The Responsibility […]

Roger Martin describes the Responsibility Virus manifesting as all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to leadership and responsibility. So when a problem manifests, if the leader succumbs to the effects of the Virus then they dive in and become the "Hero" taking all the responsibility for the problem. At which point, everyone else involved in the […]