Thoughts on “Dear Evil Tester”

9 May 2016
2 mins

Recently I’ve read a book “Dear Evil Tester” by Alan Richardson. The book has three parts: published letters, unpublished, essays.

The first part is kick-ass. You can just quote a random sentence from it and it will be great.

For instance, I really want to use this one as a personal motto:

The only principle I’m prepared to absolutely commit to, with absolute certainty, is that I can change my mind.

And this one clearly shows the moment when everything starts flying to hell:

If a person has the power to cause the project to fail, then they can say ‘testing is not required’, at the point they make the decision to doom the project.

Oh, how often it is when a check is “done”, then no, not a single step back, there will be no time for restesting and rechecking:

And as we all know, once a ‘Test Case’ is done, it can never be undone.

Guru by themselves, so classic:

Enumerate everything that you do, and only you do, and then define ‘true’ Exploratory Testing as the specific combination of items that you enumerated

The second part wasn’t so interesting. Yep, there are more practical and philosophical ideas, but they weren’t evil enough. It also applies to the third part.

Nevertheless, it’s the book you’ll want to reread — cute devil’s doodles and provocative style are awesome. And you can buy it on Leanpub.

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