This article “Testing standards? Can we do better?” follows on from my EuroSTAR 2013 tutorial, “Questioning auditors questioning testing” and also a brief discussion I had in Gothenburg with Stuart Reid about testing standards. Stuart defended standards by saying that they are mandatory only if people want to make their use mandatory, a defence that I find very revealing.
I wrote a shorter follow up “This could easily be the testing industry”, prompted by a white paper from Testing Solutions Group that envisages a future for the testing industry in which certified testers follow standards that have been mandated by contracts. It is a possible future that depresses me.
I wrote a second piece following on from EuroSTAR about the dangers of brainless optimism, “Thinking the impossible? Or wishing for the impossible?”.
My final piece (I think!) relating to my EuroSTAR tutorial discussed the problems with simplistic risk matrices, specifically the dangers of assigning probabilities to risks we know little about, “In praise of ignorance”. I also explain why I think the Incertitude Matrix is a more helpful way to think about risk.
