Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing by Gerald Weinberg

Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing – I am a little bit confused by this book and can't decide did I like it or not. Some chapters are good, some are too obvious. Obvious, of course, for me, maybe not for others, but I value books according to what new they can give to me.

First of all – version for Kindle on the Ebay is awful. All content is in one chapter (actually there are several chapters, but they are not formatted properly), which makes navigation harder:

There are some concrete characters in the book, with whom are made some examples. A lot of them are quite trivial and overdone, so they seemed pointless for me:

Some claims are doubtful. For example, claim, that the most important value of review is learning – for me it sounds like learning is the very last excuse why you should do review, because all other reasons doesn't fit. Usually (and I think in that case also) learning is a good side effect, not the purpose.
Update: see discussion in the comments about this item.

Another example – author categorically thinks that tester should not answer the question "Is the software ready to ship?" – I think that good tester definitely should answer this question and in modern projects roles are not so strictly divided:

But some claims are good and interesting:




Seems like this book is good for developers, who want to test and for testers, who are involved in testing for many-many years and they need to learn again how to test (with up-to-date tools and approaches). But for young testers, who are learning to test from scratch there are too many obvious and out-of-date recipes.

And beautiful parallel in the end:

TEDxTartu 2014

I am sure everybody knows what is TED and TEDx. On last Saturday we had TEDxTartu in my town. It is not about IT, more about sociology – the same we can say about testing. So I want to share some interesting ideas from there.


All pictures are taken from TEDxTartu 2014 Facebook album
First of all, I like that they determine talks by speakers, not by topics. There is no titles in program, there are only names (plus description of the talk is available in web). More I participate in different conference more I am convinced that this is better approach.

Margo Loor
Loor was talking about rationality. He believes that absolutely all people can master the art of argumentation – all you need is a little bit training and a lot of practice (my comment – many people think that arguing is inappropriate and rude, so they don't have practice). And his experience says that every kind of people can learn to be rational.

Loor asked some people to draw rationality and showed us some drawings. I really liked this one (in my reproduction):

It's like there is the Truth and you just moving in right direction.
One more good visualization of difficult thing (in my reproductions again):


Julius Juurmaa
Juurmaa was talking about creativity. He says that creativity is a new concept, for example, in Middle Age human didn't create anything – he did something. Also he was talking about some brain studies and the interesting thing is, that when our brain doesn't have any task (let's say it's resting) it still do some work and this work is shuffling different combinations of what we saw, what we did and what we know. And in that resting moment we can find some new ideas (= smart combination). That means, the more we experience – the more smart combinations we can find.

Riina Raudne
Raudne was talking about alcohol, but interesting thought that I had is philological. Estonians and Russians (I guess that other nationalities also) are using Facebook terminology in English – they say like and share, just in their language manner: for example, in Estonian [ˈlīkema] and [ˈshēērēma]. So they don't translate these terms and separate liking on real life and liking in the internet (unlike English speaking people). I guess it says something about role of internet in cultures.

Mait Müntel
Müntel has PhD in physics and had research experience at CERN. But he was talking about lingvist.io that he found. It's an online language learning program that helps you to learn new language in 200 hours. He was talking about his personal successful experience of learning French in smart way (way that is used in lingvist.io). So I hope to learn French there.