A testing book that impressed me: “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps” by Katrina Clokie
It’s not easy to find a good testing book: classical ones are mostly outdated, new ones are not verified by time. A lot of testers that I know do not read any books at all, saying that blogs and documentation are enough (let’s hope they read blogs😬).
I like Katrina the Tester blog and read it from time to time. A year ago I saw that its author published a book.
I didn’t hurry to start it and just put it into the reading list. But then, one by one, I saw a few reviews which made me wanna read it ASAP.
First, I read The Phoenix Project to be fully prepared to deep dive into the DevOps culture. We at GetSocial have a dedicated DevOps and I can see all the benefits of acquiring a proper culture.
Why this book impressed me so much
- It’s fresh. Thankfully it didn’t become outdated as it was written only a year ago and no game-changing tech was invented since then.
- Well-structured. No extra details, no “water”. Just great examples and a lot of references to the articles and speeches.
- References. I like when books contain references and sources, as it feels more like a scientific approach. This book completely has blown my mind with all the examples and quotes, not sure that I read even a 1/3 of them. But those that I read impressed me, as most of the events behind references did small and big changes in the testing world(e.g. this talk and this article about changing tester’s role). My favorite story is “I’ve got the monkey now”, seems I tweeted about it a few times and can do a few more.
What else?
- New approaches to be used. For example, I haven’t heard about the bug bush before. And didn’t think about the “dogfooding” approach in a way described in the book.
- Another look at your daily routine. Not sure that I respected backend monitoring enough before I read about it more and recalled all the cases when it saved us.
- I changed my mind about the daily chaos. As a tester, I always want to test more and accept any issues that appear in Prod very personally. But after reading “The Phoenix Project” and the importance of being able to release fast I realized that it’s better to release hotfixes fast than delay the feature delivery more and more. Especially keeping in mind that exhaustive testing is impossible. “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps” book has a lot of stories about how different tech companies deal with it.
That was an inspiring experience. Read testing books and broaden your competence! 🤓
P.S. You can buy the book here: https://leanpub.com/testingindevops
