This is a book on software testing and the test process. It is aimed at a person working in QA, but would be a very good read for anyone having to develop a log term testing strategy at a company or group level.

I have to tell off the bat that I think it's one of the best book ever written on the subject.

The Authors Cem Kaner (http://www.kaner.com/), James Bach (http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/james/ and http://www.satisfice.com/), and Bret Pettichord (http://www.pettichord.com/) are believers that there are not 'best practices' for testing but only 'appropriate practices'. This is called "Context Based testing'. In a way this ties in the Perl philosophy of getting the job done.
Examples of chapters titles are

"thinking like a tester",
"Bug advocacy",
"interacting with programmers",
"test design strategy"

Each chapter is broken into short lessons, about 15 per chapters. The advice is a high level and give you the mental framework to solve your own issues.

I've been testing for a few years now. Each lesson I read rang true to my experiences. It gets you back to the actual job of testing rather then getting lost in process. They treat testing a a scientific process rather then a bureaucratic one.

Many years ago James Back wrote an article that changed the way I think of testing
"Exploratory Testing" (http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf). After that I read everything I could find by him.

Bret Pettichord give a course call "Homebrew Test Automation" we he uses Ruby to teach test automation without using commercial tools.

Edit by castaway, turned URLs into links

In reply to Lessons Learned in Software Testing by ratflyer

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