Yesterday, Jason Gorman called for action. He made his readers aware that the state of the art of software development is poor – dramatically poor. If we continue to work and educate the generations to come on software development, we are surely set up to continue to decline our craft even further than we did. Gorman explains the educational system to be tremendously poor for software programmers, that we won’t survive in a few years from now – assuming that Moore’s Law continues to apply. Read his full call to action in his blog post Time To Look Seriously At Software Developer Apprenticeships.

Some of the points look compelling to me, considering where I have come from, and where I consider to be heading towards. After dropping out of university in 2006 holding my German diploma in my hands, I got my first job shortly after my father had died of lunge cancer at the age 58. (I interviewed with my employer a few days before he died.) That said, I didn’t know a thing about software testing, never attended a software testing course – not that there was one, nor that I would have been interested in the topic at that time – back in university. Within the first two weeks I mostly sat down to read about the product they were building, intended to get some knowledge about it in my head from the large documentation.

But it simply didn’t stick. All the time I was asking myself, how this would turn out. I needed something to play around with. So, I got introduced to the shell scripts they had built to test the software part I should be working on. Within some week I was able to run some of these tests on my own. Shortly after that I was working on the project to extend the behavior. I excelled at it, pulling in work from other colleagues when I found myself finishing my assigned tasks before the assigned timeframe.

One year later, we were working for our first client. In the meantime I had taken over technical responsibility for the tests we were running for the customization that we built at that time. My boss’s boss called me into his office, and offered me to lead a group of five starting from one week from then. I had stayed one and a half year with that company at that time, and was offered a leadership position for some of their testers. I took the job.

Two months later I attended that first formal software testing training… and I found it rather boring.

That said, how do software testers start to learn about their craft? I don’t know how all of them learn about the craft of software testing, yet I know how I learned it. I read in the evenings, and at the breakfast table. I worked on my PC at home trying to get more knowledge about the area I was confronted with, trying to find out new ways to “test this”, immediately trying them out the next day. I was mentored by my superior, I mentored some of our new colleagues during the whole four and a half year that I worked with that company. I asked testers to build something, I explained underlying concepts, and helped them reach an understanding of what I consider software testing to be. I helped to make them grow as well. Having the same lack of formal training in software testing, I think this is what I would call apprenticeship, isn’t it?

I wasn’t all too sure about this up until earlier this week. Having taking a testing challenge from Matt Heusser in early 2009, I had become a black-belt tester in the Miagi-Do school, turning later into a black-belt instructor. Over the past year I have worked with three testers through a challenge, and helped two of them go beyond their current level of expertise and skill.

One of them was Michael Larsen, the TESTHEAD. By far he exceeded my own expectations. He worked through the black-box software testing course, became a mentor in this course on his own. He also worked at a local boyscout club as a boyscout leader. During the past year he has produced the weekly podcast on “This Week in Software Testing” together with Thomas Ponnet and Matt Heusser. He also first reviewed some of our draft chapters in a book on how to reduce the cost of testing. Later he turned in as a chapter author himself, taking the opportunity to contribute to something that is surely becoming meaningful.

Now, Michael just announced earlier this week, that he is going to switch jobs. He is currently running a blog series on how he prepares himself for the new job, and let’s everyone else participate in his learning. Reminds me largely on the apprenticeship blogs I saw from 8thLight apprentices, Eden apprentices, or ObjectMentor apprentices.

But the interesting thing about Michael is, that he got this new job by steadily working on his passion for testing, continuing to grow, and pushing himself to new limits. But you should definitely read his blog entry on how he got where he is.

That said, apprenticeships don’t seem to be a new idea for the software testing world. Lacking formal training, and disbelieving in the syllabus of the certification programs out there, software testers have built a high reputation based on their apprenticeship programs, and we know how to run them. We already do Software Craftsmanship to educate our peers. Let’s continue this, and intensify it even further. Maybe that could be a nice goal for 2011.