Monday 23 March 2009

When a test goes wrong


Ever since I was a kid I've been interested in planes, even had vague ambitions of being a pilot. One of the most awesome planes is the SR-71 Blackbird so it was scary and interesting to read about a test flight that went badly wrong

I was also reading another blog about what testing lessons could be learnt from a vampire.
( testers only do it after the sun goes down ? testers suck the lifeblood from you ? dont make a tester cross ? )

Testers do seem to like getting ideas and inspiration from other fields ( I'm sure Amazon saw a big rise in the sales of "How Doctors Think" a couple of years ago after it became a hot topic on tester blogs ) but the Blackbird article did get me thinking about what software testers could learn from other areas of testing.
So off to Amazon I go to see if they have any good books on test pilots ( wonder if there's a Dummies Guide ? )

And I'll also have to dig out my copy of Skunkworks which describes how the Blackbird, U2 and Stealth Fighter were made, I'm sure there's some agile lessons in them...

1 comment:

Joel Montvelisky said...

Wow, what a story about the Plane disintegration...

Still, what I take with me is the second sentence on the article:
"Flying is simply hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror."

I think that I can replace Flying with Testing and terror with excitement and use it as the opening sentence in my next Training Session for young testers.