I will soon celebrate my three years anniversary as a professional software engineer in test. After three years, I still feel like I am missing some formal “education” on software testing. Despite owning a Master degree in Information Systems and Communication and having spent 5 years at University I never had any introduction to software testing ( no, it was not the course(s) I was too lazy to go to). Of course, during the last three years, I went to some conferences, read books and blogs and tried to engage with influential software testers to get some expertise on the topic.
However, I would like to have a website that aggregate as much as possible of the software testing knowledge. Developers started earlier with what is called design patterns but I could not find an equivalent for software testing. So, I asked (on the Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange QnA site) to other software testers if they were aware of any repository for software testing techniques and patterns. Answers I had were a bit scary as the only place still active on this topic was the Wikipedia portal about software testing, it looks like all repositories evolved to a “dead tree” variety. So currently most of the online knowledge on software testing is hosted on QnA sites or on personal sites where owners will have no external control over their sayings.
To address this issue, I decided to create and host a wiki about software testing patterns: http://www.testingpatterns.info. I will add as much content as possible during a full year. I hope to be able to educate myself doing so and ideally I hope that other software testers decide to give some of their time to increase the content of this wiki. I will be contacting some of the influential testers and hope to make them create a committee to validate each new pattern.
Are you interested in participating, do you know some people that might be? Please help me (blog, tweet, talk, comment) making this wiki a successful idea!
If you are interested in more than participating, ie administrating the website, feel free to contact me.
Thanks!