Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your Tests

by Gojko Adzic, David Evans, Tom Roden

This book is for cross-functional teams working in an iterative delivery environment, planning with user stories and testing frequently changing software under tough time pressure. This book will help you test your software better, easier and faster. Many of these ideas also help teams engage their business stakeholders better in defining key expectations and improve the quality of their software products.

Genres: Programming, Software, Technology, Nonfiction, Computer Science, Technical, Reference

237 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2015

About the author

Gojko Adzic is a partner at Neuri Consulting LLP, winner of the 2016 European Software Testing Outstanding Achievement Award, and the 2011 Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Award. Gojko's book Specification by Example won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012, and his blog won the UK Agile Award for the best online publication in 2010.

Gojko is a frequent keynote speaker at leading software development conferences and one of the authors of MindMup and Narakeet.

Reviews

[Sebastian Gebski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid, but nothing more (and I expect far more from a person like G. Adzic).

None of proposed techniques differ a lot from what I've already encountered in any form or shape in the past. No controversies, no bold ideas, no 'oh snap' reactions. And what is more - usually the title of the technique says it all, so the actual description is pretty redundant. Is it necessarily bad? Not really - it means that Gojko is great in giving a clear & brief message :) but on the other hand it makes an impression of book being shallow & bloated.

Does it all mean that book is crap & the content has no value? Of course not - techniques make sense & some of them are VERY important (version control tests alongside code, wait for events instead of time, don't organize by work items, etc.), but I thought that advanced testing book (and I considered this as such) will bring something new, something I haven't seen yet. Well, maybe I was wrong & truly advanced level is not about more advanced technique but just about better execution of the basic ones ...

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a kind of follow up on the "Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories". It's also a follow-up on "Specification by example". As such, we'll find excellent complementary adices on acceptance testing. On the other subject, we may also find some good stuff. However it doesn't gives anything about the rest of the tests: integration testing, UX, exploratory, performance, etc. It's probably a well-known choice but for me a bit of frustration.
ma note de lecture en français ici

[Gábor L. Hajba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a bad book, it combines ideas from the author's other books like Specification by Example or Fifty Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories.

The book contains a basic set of ideas which you can apply to your tests, testing strategy, test design if you see them fit. They are not a must -- and some can be used even in a non-agile project too.

What I liked is that you can take some tips and combine it with other resources to see them working. For example test half-life can be combined with tools of Adam Tornhill's Your Code as a Crime Scene.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really quick read, which recaps lots of things that I've read from other books. For me this is a really good starter and also a nice reference.

I especially like the mention of specification by example, but this shouldn't surprise anyone, if you consider Gojko Adzic is one of the authors. :)

[Michael McCain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this is what it says it is. 50 mini articles on various testing techniques.
It's not presented in a very digestible format, and lots of the suggestions are implementable only by managers or higher

[Tammy Rhoades-Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was very helpful as a business analyst working in agile. My teammates are reading it now too, and we plan to implement many of these ideas into our testing.

[Geert · Rating 3 out of 5]

expected more. no aha moments.

[Peter Dancsok · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an OK book to refresh some base principles. Nothing exciting nothing new but a good read nevertheless.

[Robson Castilho · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good advices.
Lacks some more solid examples.
Some topics are very abstract (maybe the author supposes your an experienced QA analyst with background with many tools and practices).

[Serendipity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good ideas, it was a nice refresher

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with the other books of Fifty Quick Ideas you get 50 ideas nicely arranged to a topic. Most of those ideas are not new and you will have encountered many of them when you wrote your tests. However, the benefit of this book is that you have them all in one place.

The ideas are often really simple and you can call them common sense. Until you tried it otherwise you most likely can’t appreciate how helpful those are. “Describe what, not how”, “Wait for events, not time” or “Minimise UI interactions” are three simple examples that can cost you hundreds of hours if you don’t follow them.

There is another category of ideas which may easily be overlooked by testers. Often the problem is not with the technology, but with the people. Ideas like “Start with always/never” is a great exercise to get examples and test cases from the business users. Again it’s not rocket science, but it will make your life much easier. I therefore can only recommend to buy this book and read all ideas, not just the ones you think they help you with the technical side of testing.

[Wilson Jimenez · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rather than a technical discussion on how to build your tests, the main topic is about how to create your user stories, structure specification through acceptance criteria and leverage team collaboration in order to better test a complete system.

Tips are based on real world experiences from the authors, which is good.

Authors advocate that tests should focus on value added rather than functional correctness.

It's a quick read and description images make it fun.

My problems with it are that it feels bloated and the title misleading, it seems like a book written for training your manual QA team on how to test-run a system. From my experience, a dedicated manual QA team in Agile can create problems like a disconnect from development and testing when collaboration is not great between both teams, information loosing due to handoffs, or lack of automated testing from development due to developers delegating all testing tasks to manual testers. There doesn't seem to be ideas around how to mitigate these type of issues in the book.

[Edward Dahllöf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked this book better than the user story one, I think the testing topic is too often neglected and this book have some nice ideas that I would like to try out. I'm not shore about the format, it's repetitive and boring to read in one go, use it rather as a book to flip through.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book. It is not an introductory book, rather than help as you go along. Really want to read the other two books in "50 quick ideas to improve your..." series.