Software Testing Blog

The good folks over at Software Test Professionals want to remind you about a very important election this Fall. No, we’re not talking about the U.S. Congress. And no, we’re not referring to American Idol either (at least not in this post).  Instead, we’re talking about something lasting and meaningful: the 1st Annual Luminary Award.

As described on their award page, this honor will “recognize a person in the software testing and quality community, who inspires others and dedicates their career to industry advancement.” The organizers were looking for someone who has dedicated their career to the betterment of software testing and quality; who has shown exceptional leadership and who has educated, promoted and published on behalf of the industry. In other words, a software testing luminary.

With that type of criteria in mind, we’re not surprised to see Cem Kaner, James Bach and Jerry Weinberg as this year’s finalists. You may know Kaner and Bach from our recent Testing the Limits interviews (Jerry, if you’re reading this, we’d love to have you as a guest as well). But in case you’re unfamiliar with these testing giants, here are clips from their award bios:

Cem Kaner
The focus of Cem Kaner’s career is the satisfaction and safety of software customers, users and developers. His work is multidisciplinary—testing is one of the disciplines.

Kaner sees much of software engineering as applied social science. “We create software for the benefit of people. The essential measure of the value of that software is how well it works for the people it’s supposed to serve.” As he sees it, testing is more importantly about assessing the worth of a product or service than its conformance to documentation. To advance in the profession, Kaner argues that testers must develop and apply technological and cognitive skills, rather than relying on routine processes. He coined the term “exploratory testing” in the 1980′s to describe cognitively-engaged testing and distinguish it from scripted approaches. Continue reading….

James Bach
If Devil’s Advocate were a sport, James Bach would play it professionally. You’d see him on TV promoting Magnetic Analysis Corporation’s Finned Tube Test Coils (“Flux leakage analysis done RIGHT!”). Alas there is no such sport, so he’s a consulting software tester instead.

James owns and operates Satisfice, Inc. He’s a founder and leading voice in the Context-Driven school of testing (one of our industry’s several prominently competing communities of practice). He’s also a founding member of the Association for Software Testing. He has written many articles, co-authored “Lessons Learned in Software Testing”, and wrote “Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar”, a book about technical self-education. Continue reading….

Gerald Weinberg
Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg has always loved to create computer systems and programs. He’s a programmer through and through. And he has never stopped programming; he’s still at it. When one domain has been exhausted of interesting (i.e. hard) problems, he’s moved on to another until he reached domains where the problems are very hard, very compelling. There he continues to do requirements, analysis, design, code, and test to this day. Those still very interesting problem domains are himself, others, and organizations.

Jerry is author or co-author of several hundred articles and more than 30 books. His earliest published work was on operating systems and programming languages, but the 1971 publication of The Psychology of Computer Programming is considered by many the beginning of the study of software engineering as human behavior. Continue reading….

The polls will be open until September 2nd, so make sure you cast your vote before then. The winner will be announced and presented at the Software Test Professionals Conference & Expo 2010 in Las Vegas, NV October 19th – 21st.

Good luck to all the candidates!