ISO 29119 is dead in the water

The ISO are attempting to standardise testing, but there’s no consensus in the testing community. In particular:

‘An opponent of the specification, Scotland-based test consultant James Christie, does not like the idea of a standardized approach to software testing nor the approach of the ISO effort. ISO 29119 puts too much emphasis on process and documentation rather than the real testing,” Christie says. Of course that is not its purpose or the intention of the people who have developed it. However, I have seen in practice how people react when they are dealing with a messy, complex problem and there are detailed, prescriptive standards and processes on hand. They focus on complying with the standard and lose sight of the real goal.”’ 

Sound familiar? ;-)

Take a look at the conversation on Twitter to get a feel for the level of opposition.

I think the Context Driven school do a much better job of providing testers with a guidance and a rich education; See Cem Kaner’s Black Box Software Testing course and James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing courses. Cem Kaner’s course materials are available online via a Creative Commons license. The context-driven approach is about descriptivism rather than prescriptivism.

August 29, 2014


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