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Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests: is it worth reading?
Fifty short, independent, immediately actionable improvements to how a team tests.
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- published
- 2015
- key ideas
- 2
- reading path
- 1
Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests
by Gojko Adzic, David Evans, Tom Roden
- Publisher
- Neuri Consulting
- Year
- 2015
Useful when you are: Practising tester, Senior / lead
Verdict
Should you read it?
Read it if
You run retrospectives and want concrete things to try, or your team has plateaued and you need specific moves rather than another principle.
Skip it if
You want a coherent framework. There deliberately is not one, and readers expecting a methodology find it disjointed.
The argument
What it argues
A deliberately unsystematic collection. Each idea occupies two or three pages, states a problem, proposes a change, and explains how to tell whether it worked. There is no methodology and no argument connecting them.
That format is the point: it is designed to be opened at a random page in a retrospective and acted on the same week. Ideas range from improving how test cases are named to restructuring what a team automates and why.
It is the most immediately practical book in this library, and the one most likely to change something in your team within a fortnight.
Key ideas
Ideas worth taking from it
- 01
Improvement as small independent moves
Quality improvement does not require a transformation programme. Fifty individually small changes, adopted one at a time, compound.
- 02
Testing as a design activity
Several ideas are about what a test communicates rather than what it verifies, which reframes test writing as documentation design.
Criticism
What has dated, and what it gets wrong
Uneven by construction: some ideas are genuinely excellent and some are obvious to anyone with a few years of experience. The brevity also means several ideas are stated without enough detail to implement without further research.
Reading paths
On our reading paths
From tester to test lead
Book 3 of 5 · Moving into a lead role
Fifty short ideas for improving a test strategy, each small enough to try with a team inside one sprint.
1. Perfect Software
2. More Agile Testing- 3. Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests (this book)
4. How Google Tests Software
5. Accelerate
Keep reading
What to read next
Reading about quality is cheaper than learning it in production.
QAble runs QA for products in BFSI, gaming, healthcare and SaaS, with engineers who have read these and argued about them. Start with a free QA audit.