I took a few moments today to record another video blog entry, which you can find at Regional Software Testing Immaturity: Fact or Fallacy?
Here’s the synopsis: I’m in Los Angeles, on my way to the STANZ conference in Australia and New Zealand. That and other recent international trips have gotten me thinking about something that I often hear at such international conferences, which are comments along the lines of, “You know, software testing as a profession and a practice is really immature in region X,” where region X might or might not be where I’m at. Based on my experience with clients around the world, though, the gap isn’t as big as people often think it is. Is software testing actually significantly less mature in some regions than others? What has your experience been? I’d be interested in opinions, case studies, and stories from you, especially the many international readers of this blog but also people in North America.
Tags: software test management, software testing, testing immaturity
Rex Black is President of RBCS (
Hi All,
I have been training people in Spanish in Colombia, México, Perú, Bolivia and Uruguay… and in my experience is that Software Testing is not immature anymore. The gap is becomming smaller because more countries in Latin America are developing software for around the world and the software quality requirements are the same around the globe.
A question: Does anybody have some known statistics about defect densities related to developers? Something like Number of Defects found / Number of Lines of Code written by Developer X
Thanks Gary.
I believe it a fallacy. In my experience (New Zealand) *alot* of testers tend to come from the business and possibly this aids in the perception that software testing might not be as mature here compared to say, India where testers may come via the software engineering route (and hence a more technical perspective).
However, I have met a *number* of testers with business backgrounds that are excellent at questioning and observing and applying and I have met a number of technically skilled testers that are not (and vice versa).
So, in my opinion, the question is not so much maturity based on area but maturity based on the individual.
Regional maturity of testers is a fallacy.
Case in point – I attended Rex’s Advanced Technical Test Analyst course in Brisbane and there were a number of testers from all over Australia and New Zealand. Some were very good at scripting or understanding code and others were better at other things. Individually different, collectively diverse but most likely no more or less mature than comparative *teams* from around the world.
Brian, I would agree with your comments. Yes, the variation in individual testers is so large–in all regions I’ve visited–as to make generalizations based on regions meaningless.
I m also agree with Brain, Software testing is depend upon fallacy.its differ from region to region.
Andy, thanks for the posting. However, I don’t understand what you mean. “Software testing is depend upon fallacy”? What do you mean by that? Also, when you wrote, “its differ from region to region,” that seems to mean that you think that testing maturity differs regionally, but the whole point of my posting and also Brian’s response what that he and I *don’t* think it differs regionally. So perhaps you disagree with our posting?