Last Friday I visited my old university where I studied up until just four years from now. The place where I learned how to learn. It was amazing how little changed beside the fact that students nowadays get charged a whole lot more money for their education. In Germany currently there is a rough discussion about these fees and that the universities do not take care for the educational side properly. The graduation celebration I visited last Friday was accompanied with a talk from a previous mentor of mine. He had some data on how education had changed over the last decade and made a comparison between the old Diplom courses and the new Bachelor and Master system. Reflecting over the past years and that talk, I came to the realization that there seems to be a gap in our industry currently.
What did I see or hear that leads me to this conclusion? Reflecting back four years from now I knew nothing about software testing. Over the last years of my study I concentrated on pattern recognition, like face-detection in images, and my diploma thesis handled about hand gesture detection in human-robot interaction scenarios. Back in April 2006 I joined a team of great testers and needed to learn software testing. Thus far I had not participated in a course on software testing. The team I was working in was doing a whole bunch of software test automation using shell-scripts. Over the course of the next few years I did learn how to teach myself what software testing is about. I learned that software test automation is software development, I learned that exploratory and sapient tests are very worth the effort, when accompanied with the right organizational methods, and I learned a whole bunch about Craftsmanship and Cooperative learning sessions.
In general I would conclude that I learned almost eighty percent of the stuff I need on a daily basis right after leaving the university, while the material I learned in university is not that relevant for me any more. As a software tester I don’t need to know how a wrenches for robot hand motorics work, since I don’t need them. Multi-layer perceptrons are not an option for me. Learning algorithms like AdaBoost and online and offline algorithms are not needed in order to test software. Well, I wouldn’t claim that the rough six years I spend at the university were wasted, but I feel that I dd not learn the right things there.
Recently I noticed that there seem to be others who feel just like me. The Software Craftsmanship conducts coding dojos and programming katas to teach the apprentices what the universities are not teaching them. Design Principles like SOLID and Design Patterns are taught on a on-the-job training between Journeyman and Apprentices. For software testers there are similar things happening, i.e. James Bach and Michael Bolton created a Rapid Software Testing class, Cem Kaner has also great courses. Yet, besides Cem Kaner and other distinct persons we do not seem to have reached the universities with our efforts. When I took a course named “Software Praktikum” back in the year 2000, people were talking about test-driven development and that new movement called eXtreme Programming, but no one really taught us something about it.
When I took a look on the course material nowadays I found out that the situation had been improved over the last few years. Nowadays students get offered test-driven development courses, some Design Patterns and maybe some Refactoring. Unfortunately I did not run across a testing course at my university.
Therefore I concluded that I would like to do something on this as part of a New Year’s resolution. Personally I want to help people understand software testing, help them grow into the craft and hopefully get a better tester than I am. There are a lot of movements currently going on, and I think based on my past I can be a contribution to these movements. This is all I want to say for now. If I made you curious about more, you may want to subscribe to my feed, as I will be digging deeper here shortly.