Evil Tester

I dislike the term QA when applied to testers in general. I dislike it more when applied to my team. I dislike it even more when applied to me. If you read this, and you use the term QA - stop it. 
Bad Trend towards QA
Unfortunately if I graphed the trend for verbal usage of […]

Sometime back, Linda Wilkinson had a good post on Test Contractor behaviour I shall add a few more ‘things not to do’ to the list based on some recent (and slightly less recent) experiences with contract testing staff.

Just in case anyone thought that EvilTester.com was getting too serious I thought I better provide a little background to the “Why Evil?” question.
The first answer seemed flippant, but all too appropriate… “Because Evil leads to comedy gold.”
Allow me to explain.

Back in 2001? 2002? Back whenever I noticed the ISEB certification starting, I thought “Hmm… how strange, I wonder why they would want to do this”.
I read an early draft of the syllabus online and thought “Well this seems fairly simple, but misses out a lot of stuff that I do in the […]

“Me too. Me too. Me too.” That sums up my reaction to Antony Marcano’s TestingReflections post on interviewing testers that just don’t ‘come up to scratch’. Those testers we interview who claim to have a passion for testing but don’t exhibit said passion.
I’ve gone through the same as Antony and have no words of […]

Should ISEB even run a certification scheme?
If Industry really does have a demand for it then perhaps ISEB’s role should involve collating the Industry needs and passing them on to the Universities to provide the necessary certification mechanism. Academia generally seems to ‘get’ certification.

What an easy target ISEB makes, it comes in for a lot of criticism. And I think it should. To an outsider like myself the certification train looks like a money spinning exercise, why else keep cranking out certification levels? I wonder what they could do to change my perception…

At EuroSTAR 2007 Michael Bolton started the conference off with "Why I am not Certified" - Michael had obviously kept more up to date on the ISEB progress than I. I looked at the ISEB site recently, and now I feel uneasy.

I state no "MUST"s in here, you don’t "HAVE" to know how to program to work effectively as a tester but…when you do know how to program, then you have more options. How many more? Well…

I have an unhealthy dislike of the current trend towards "fictional" example ‘based’ essays.
You know the type…
It was Monday and I struggled into the office out of the pouring rain and before I’d even sat down, let alone think about getting a cup of coffee and reading the latest Dilbert gag, Jane walked […]