There are a number of blogs that I enjoy reading about all areas of the software development process. The software development process includes project management, business analysis, development, and testing, of course. In addition, delivering software that works requires consideration of concepts around management, sales, and business organization.

I’d like to share some of the blogs that I find influential when thinking about how to build software that works.

James Bach and Exploratory Testing

One of my favorite blogs is James Bach’s Blog. He is the creator of Rapid Software Testing. I first became interested in his blog because he wrote about exploratory testing in a way that made sense to me. I knew from experience that exploratory testing was one of the best ways to find important bugs, but I didn’t have a great way to communicate the high value of exploratory testing to teams that were focused heavily on mechanizing the testing process. James Bach has written a lot on the topic of exploratory testing. This particular post about the history of Exploratory Testing captures many of the concepts that drew me to the blog.

I particularly like the concepts of testing vs checking and the “responsible tester.”

Feedback

What do you think of James Bach’s blog and the concepts he writes about? What blogs and resources do you find particularly interesting and useful for building software that works?