The following are some of the comments I’ve received from the signers of the ISTQB Foundations Exam Review petition. They are obviously biased, but interesting themes are developing. Chris Carter (another training provider) has just been elected president of the ISTQB, so please take a moment to send him an email (chris.carter@istqb.org) to let him know you’d like some answers. Enjoy! Continue reading
Strange Bedfellows
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. – Noam Chomsky
Earlier this year, I wrote about the “bizarre public spectacle made up of innuendo, accusations and irony” that the context driven testing website seems to have spiraled into lately. So when I saw the latest missive launched at my questions for the ISTQB, it wasn’t surprising that it was filled with the usual snark (Rabid Software Testing) and name calling (twits). If you can get past the juvenile antics, there are a couple of points that although, mostly irrelevant to the discussion, call for a response.
Certifiable – Fighting the fights worth fighting…
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” ― Thomas Paine
If you have followed me lately on Twitter, you may have noticed a slight, well let’s say, fervor pursing answers to the questions I posed to the ISTQB. Since publishing that letter a little over a week ago, an important conversation in the software testing community has been reignited over Twitter, LinkedIn, multiple blogs, and loaded up my inbox. And that conversation is NOT about testing certifications or the rackets employed to “regulate”, train, and issue them. Let me be clear, the certification debate is very important, but it is a symptom of a disease in our business: the disease of not owning our value proposition. Continue reading
An open letter to the ISTQB
Date: April, 25 2013
To: ISTQB BOD
Cc: ISTQB Governance Working Group
Subject: Open Letter to the ISTQB
To whom it may concern;
Recently a discussion transpired over Twitter regarding the validity and governance of the Foundation level exam you offer through your training partners. Rex Black, a current board member and past president of the ISTQB, was involved in the exchanges and made the following comments in response to my queries about whether there have there ever been problems with the certifications validity, specifically the reliability coefficient:
Bursting CDT Bubbles
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” - George Bernard Shaw
Conference season has started again, and I’ve made some rounds giving talks at QAI QUEST in Chicago and STAR Canada in Toronto. I had a great time at both talking about problems with bias towards software testing (both positive and negative), and what we and the industry do to support them. But despite all the great conversations I had with colleagues and people I met for the first time, it became clear to me that the context driven community needs to do a better job getting the word out. Continue reading