How Google Tests Software

It is so exciting being part of an industry that is rapidly changing and won't be the same in 5 years or 10 years. Change means opportunity...opportunity not just to "fix" the pervasive misconceptions of what test is and how it should be done, but opportunity to cross into uncharted territory and come up with solutions that no one has ever tried before. That particular point - the idea of the future of test being open and uncharted - is incredibly cool. The book promotes ideas that are radical now but that eventually will become the norm - or they will be tossed as failures and replaced with something better. But the point is that opening up the discussion gives people license to think and experiment, to implement new things that could become great successes or massive failures. Either way, it's a step in the right direction, because test needs a lot of experimentation and empirical thinking right now to go from where it is to where it could be. I enjoyed the practicality of the book - it provided examples of real issues and how they were approached and solved, or not solved. I also enjoyed the lack of dogmatic "this is the only way to do it" mentality. I felt reading it that the authors were simply opening up and sharing, and that if someone was to come up with a great new idea to try, they'd give it a shake. Great pioneers and scientists care only about progress in their field, not about who gets the glory for the progress, and I felt like that's what this book was after - progress. Great book to get you thinking and learning, and where there are gaps or open-ended questions, this is the territory for opportunity.

I learned to develop software in the 1990s and started full-time work in the 2000s. I took time off to study other fields and returned to the practice in 2012, about the time this book came out. In the last 13-or-so years, I’ve noticed that the art of testing software has changed significantly. Twenty-five years ago, I started to code in an academic lab where we did our own testing out of necessity. In industry, I found teams arranged to perform tests. Now, it seems that testing has become a developer-only task again. I didn’t understand the backstory and am always interested in improving my skills. Thus, I purchased a few books on testing in general because I couldn’t find many newer works on testing that transformed the field. Most of the books, like this one, haven’t added a ton of new content since the 2010s unless it is related to security or automation. Even though this book is 13 years old – an eternity in software development – it marked a historical culture change in software development. It taught that developers should be intimately involved in testing of their code and that testing code is not an intellectually inferior task. It sought to reframe the development-test cycle back into bettering the product. Indeed, the conclusion sought to get rid of the role of a pure test engineer in favor of a hybrid developer/tester approach. This book focuses on managerial principles that implement this transition. It doesn’t address the nitty-gritty of testing practices and instead expounds upon how Google rearranged testing as a part of every developer’s workflow. It used to be that “test” and “dev” would cycle back and forth many times to fix bugs. Google’s then-new approach united the process and enhanced both speed of delivery and the quality of the product. This approach suited the world wide web better. Few organizations work under the older paradigm anymore, and this book ushered in the change. The older paradigm helped develop software running on separated devices, but the Internet facilitated continual deployment where fixes could be shipped quickly with direct user feedback instead of lengthy testing runs. In turn, many former testers reoriented their efforts towards finding security holes and other software-related tasks. It’s interesting to trace this history and understand the drivers behind the culture change. I’m not sure understanding these nuances are necessary for most developers and especially not so for newer developers, but they enrich my knowledge of how coding practices have evolved in my lifetime.

It's all about expectations. I didn't expected understand all details of testing inside Google by reading this book. First because it would never fit into 300 pages, second because it is obvious that they have many "secrets" and innovation that they are not able to share yet. I actually expected see a little about how they see testing, what they think is important in testing nowadays and in the future, what is the problems they had and, in a high level way, how they overcome (or not) those problems. And I am happy with what i read. This book made me realize they are innovating a lot, that they do a lot of amazing work there (and they share it, what is equal important), but at the same time they are really close to us in many other aspects, such as thinking about how make builds more reliable and fast, how deliver high value software as fast as possible, how to bring tests from a end-to-end level to a service level, how take the most of cloud infrastructure to benefit testing and so on. It is not a book for testers, it is a book for the ones who care about testing and mainly, the ones who care about deliver the right software in the right way.

O livro tinha duas pontas com as folhas ligeiramente dobradas.

Quality of the paper in the book is not good.

I wish my company had the same approach towards test automation! Very good book that inspires and shows that 'it can bo done'! Many practical examples of how testers work, what problems they solve and how their job contribute to the quality improvement policy.

Google dudes using TLAs to explain why everything they do is better. It boils down to "we only hire genius-level dudes: even the janitor is like, william hunting"... that said, this stuff is Good To Know

I am quite some time around in the Software quality and Testing business, and I have seen and read a lot of books about that topic: Structuring by V-Model, different analysis and design methods, testing as part of a process model and so on. The issue that I had with most, nearly all of them was: Why start testing at the end? Why not prevent defects instead of having to find them? And be made responsible in case, they slipped through. This book is different, like the company. They try to catch a defect before it can make its way to the code, they will rather put off functionality, if it is not properly tested, and so on. All things, that I personally think, make so much sense, and which are not followed by the PMs and Devs of the current business. As I said before, this book is my favorite at least for this year. If not for the decade. It motivated me to get back to programming, to be able to facilitate automatic testing to the dev people to overcome the pain for them. Great!