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The best software testing books, by role and by problem
The books that are actually worth the time, arranged the way you would use them: reading paths for each role, books chosen for the problem in front of you, and honest notes on every one, including what has dated.
- books
- 30
- reading paths
- 6
- subjects
- 12
- affiliate links
- 0
Start here
If you only read six books from this library, make it these.
From QAble · Free ebook
The Quality Engineering Operating System
A practical playbook for engineering release confidence at scale
How to build release confidence as a system rather than as a testing phase, written from engagements where it had to be rebuilt.
We wrote this one, so it sits here rather than in our own rankings.
Reading paths
What to read, in what order
Pick the path that matches where you are. Each one is short, ordered, and says why each book comes at that point rather than earlier or later.
Your first year in testing
Four books that build judgement before tooling: how to explore a product, how to decide what matters, and how testing fits a delivery team.
- 1
Explore It!
Elisabeth Hendrickson · 2013
Start with practice rather than theory. Charters and variation heuristics change how you test within a week, and give you something concrete to try on Monday.
- 2
Lessons Learned in Software Testing
Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord · 2001
Once you have tested for a while, these short lessons explain the judgement behind the work: what to test when you cannot test everything, and how to report a bug so it gets fixed.
- 3
Agile Testing
Lisa Crispin, Janet Gregory · 2009
Most testing now happens inside delivery teams. This is the standard map of how a tester contributes across a sprint, and the source of the testing quadrants you will hear about in interviews.
- 4
The Pragmatic Programmer
David Thomas, Andrew Hunt · 2019
Testers increasingly work in code. This builds the engineering habits, such as automating the boring parts and owning your tools, that make that move easier.
Becoming an automation engineer
From tests that pass to suites that last: test design at the unit level, the right use of test doubles, and getting tests around code that has none.
- 1
Test Driven Development: By Example
Kent Beck · 2002
Short and practical. It teaches the red, green, refactor rhythm and, more usefully, how small and focused a test can be.
- 2
Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns
Vladimir Khorikov · 2020
The best modern account of what makes a test valuable and when mocks help or hurt. Read it before your suite is large enough to make those mistakes expensive.
- 3
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce · 2009
Shows tests driving the design of a realistic system from the outside in, end-to-end tests included. Harder going than the first two, and worth it.
- 4
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Michael C. Feathers · 2004
Most automation work happens on code that was never written to be tested. This is the manual for breaking dependencies safely so tests can go in.
- 5
Specification by Example
Gojko Adzic · 2011
Takes automation up a level, to executable specifications agreed with the business, and explains why BDD fails when it becomes a tooling exercise.
From tester to test lead
The move from doing testing to shaping how a team tests: talking to stakeholders, coaching the whole team, and arguing for change with evidence.
- 1
Perfect Software
Gerald M. Weinberg · 2008
Read it before your next difficult stakeholder conversation. It explains what testing can and cannot tell anyone, which is the conversation a lead has every week.
- 2
More Agile Testing
Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin · 2014
Picks up where Agile Testing stops, with the problems of leading testing across several teams, distributed groups and organisational change.
- 3
Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests
Gojko Adzic, David Evans, Tom Roden · 2015
Fifty short ideas for improving a test strategy, each small enough to try with a team inside one sprint.
- 4
How Google Tests Software
James Whittaker, Jason Arbon, Jeff Carollo · 2012
Testing as an engineering discipline at very large scale. Read it for the role definitions and test planning ideas, knowing that few organisations look like Google.
- 5
Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim · 2018
The research a lead needs to argue for faster feedback and smaller releases with evidence rather than opinion.
Quality in continuous delivery
How testing fits a pipeline that ships many times a day, and the evidence that deployment speed and stability go together rather than against each other.
- 1
The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford · 2013
A novel, and the quickest way into the ideas. Read it first to recognise the problems the rest of the path solves.
- 2
Continuous Delivery
Jez Humble, David Farley · 2010
The founding text of the deployment pipeline, and still the clearest account of where each kind of automated test belongs in it.
- 3
Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim · 2018
The research behind the four key delivery metrics, and the evidence that speed and stability are not a trade-off.
- 4
The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis · 2021
The practical companion: concrete practices for flow, feedback and learning, each with a case study.
- 5
Site Reliability Engineering
Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy · 2016
What happens after release: error budgets, monitoring and incident response, which is where much of modern quality work now sits.
Performance and reliability
For testers moving into performance and resilience work: how systems fail in production, how data systems behave under load, and how to find a bottleneck properly.
- 1
Release It!
Michael T. Nygard · 2018
Start here. It catalogues the ways production systems fail and the patterns that contain failure, which gives a performance tester a list of things to test for.
- 2
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann · 2017
Explains replication, partitioning and consistency, so you can predict where a data-heavy system will break under load and design the test that proves it.
- 3
Systems Performance
Brendan Gregg · 2020
The reference for analysing performance at the operating system level: finding the bottleneck rather than only reporting that a response was slow.
- 4
Site Reliability Engineering
Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy · 2016
Turns reliability into targets and error budgets, which is what a performance test result is ultimately measured against.
Leading a quality team
People, team design and the management career, with two classics that still explain most of the project failures a manager will see.
- 1
Peopleware
Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister · 2013
The classic argument that most project failures are sociological rather than technical, and still the best book on the conditions people need to do good work.
- 2
The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. · 1995
Why adding people to a late project makes it later, and other lessons every planning meeting seems to relearn.
- 3
Team Topologies
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais · 2019
A modern model for team design and the boundaries between teams, with direct consequences for where testing responsibility should sit.
- 4
The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier · 2017
The practical guide to each step of the management ladder, from mentoring one person to leading other managers.
Start from a problem
What is going wrong, and what to read about it
Most people come to a book because something at work is not going well. Choose the closest match.
Most of that comes from testing at the wrong level and from tests coupled to implementation details. These books explain what a valuable test looks like and where each kind belongs.
What to read
Our automated suite is slow, flaky and nobody trusts it
Most of that comes from testing at the wrong level and from tests coupled to implementation details. These books explain what a valuable test looks like and where each kind belongs.
What to read
We have inherited code with no tests
Get characterisation tests around the behaviour before changing anything, then improve the structure in small, safe steps.
What to read
Testing always gets squeezed at the end of the sprint
Testing that starts when development finishes will always be squeezed. Move it into the conversation about requirements and make it the whole team’s work.
What to read
Developers, testers and the business disagree about what was asked for
Agree concrete examples before anything is built, and turn those examples into tests, so the specification and the checks cannot drift apart.
What to read
Releases are risky, so we ship rarely
Shipping rarely makes each release riskier, not safer. Smaller, more frequent releases through an automated pipeline reduce risk, and there is research to show it.
What to read
The system falls over under real traffic
Learn how production systems fail, how the data layer behaves under load, and how to find the real bottleneck before guessing at fixes.
What to read
Stakeholders expect testing to prove there are no bugs
Testing provides information, not guarantees. These books give you the words to say so without sounding defensive.
What to read
Our QA team is a bottleneck and is always the last to know
This is usually a team design problem rather than a capacity problem. Change where testing sits and who owns quality before adding people.
What to read
We want to cover security without hiring a specialist
Access control and application logic are within a functional tester’s reach. Start there, on systems you are authorised to test.
Shelves
Browse by shelf
Recent editions
The newest books and new editions in the library, most recent first.
Older books that have not dated
Their examples are old. Their central arguments are still being relearned.
The whole library
All 30 books
Search across titles, authors and the ideas each book is known for, or narrow by subject and by the stage you are at.
Subject
Useful when you are
All 30 books
Lessons Learned in Software Testing
Cem Kaner and others
2001
Explore It!
Elisabeth Hendrickson
2013
Perfect Software
Gerald M. Weinberg
2008
How Google Tests Software
James Whittaker and others
2012
Agile Testing
Lisa Crispin and others
2009
More Agile Testing
Janet Gregory and others
2014
Specification by Example
Gojko Adzic
2011
Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests
Gojko Adzic and others
2015
Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns
Vladimir Khorikov
2020
Test Driven Development: By Example
Kent Beck
2002
Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
Steve Freeman and others
2009
xUnit Test Patterns
Gerard Meszaros
2007
Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Michael C. Feathers
2004
Refactoring
Martin Fowler
2018
Release It!
Michael T. Nygard
2018
Site Reliability Engineering
Betsy Beyer and others
2016
Systems Performance
Brendan Gregg
2020
Continuous Delivery
Jez Humble and others
2010
Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren and others
2018
The DevOps Handbook
Gene Kim and others
2021
The Phoenix Project
Gene Kim and others
2013
Team Topologies
Matthew Skelton and others
2019
Software Engineering at Google
Titus Winters and others
2020
Peopleware
Tom DeMarco and others
2013
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann
2017
Building Microservices
Sam Newman
2021
The Web Application Hacker's Handbook
Dafydd Stuttard and others
2011
The Mythical Man-Month
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
1995
The Pragmatic Programmer
David Thomas and others
2019
The Manager's Path
Camille Fournier
2017
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
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