Joe Strazzere read our book - his review is here. Thanks Joe for taking the time to read and comment.
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One of the suggestions I received after this post was to share the table of contents so people could get an idea of what's inside the book. The "thud" you just heard was my hand hitting my head since this is so obvious I should have done it without any prompting.
Here's an excerpt from the introduction of the book that puts the layout into a bit of context.
This book starts by familiarizing the reader with Microsoft products, Microsoft engineers,
Microsoft testers, the role of test, and general approaches to engineering software. The
second part of the book discusses many of the test approaches and tools commonly used
at Microsoft. The third part of the book discusses tools and systems we use in our work. The final section of the book discusses future directions in testing and quality at Microsoft and how we intend to create that future.
Part I, “About Microsoft”
Chapter 1, “Software Engineering at Microsoft,”
Chapter 2, “Software Test Engineers at Microsoft”
Chapter 3, “Engineering Life Cycles”
Part II, “About Testing”
Chapter 4, “A Practical Approach to Test Case Design”
Chapter 5, “Functional Testing Techniques”
Chapter 6, “Structural Testing Techniques”
Chapter 7, “Analyzing Risk with Code Complexity”
Chapter 8, “Model-Based Testing”
Part III, “Test Tools and Systems”
Chapter 9, “Managing Bugs and Test Cases”
Chapter 10, “Test Automation”
Chapter 11, “Non-Functional Testing”
Chapter 12, “Other Tools”
Chapter 13, “Customer Feedback Systems”
Chapter 14, “Testing Software Plus Services”
Part IV, “About the Future”
Chapter 15, “Solving Tomorrow’s Problems Today”
Chapter 16, “Building the Future”
Look intriguing? Amazon.com still has copies of hwtsam in stock (amazon.co.uk sold out and is still out of stock!)
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Over the last 7 days hwtsam appeared on amazon.com and other online sites, briefly surged in sales, then tapered off into where I expected yet-another-book-on-software-testing to go. The thing about this book is that it's not just another book on software testing. (Besides being my book), it's more about stories and pragmatic advice than theory (although there's some of that too).
Something tells me I should be doing more to get the word out. I've contacted a few bloggers I respect to see if they'd review the book on their blog. I'm also speaking at a few conferences in the spring (although not directly about the book) - but that's not for 4 months.
What else should I be doing? Do the folks at testrepublic, softwaretestingclub, or sqaforums have someplace I should be hanging out begging people to buy the book? I hate to spam people with info they may not want to see, but I would love to get enough copies out in the world that I could start to build up groups of people who both love and despise me!
Any thoughts from the masses on what else I (or Bj or Ken, for that matter) should be doing?
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HWTSAM has spent most of the day as the #1 selling book on software testing on Amazon.com. The other authors and I were excited to see this, but being a realist (as most testers are), an overall sales rank in the vicinity of 10k means that we probably sold 10 or so copies today, and being #1 is probably something that happens to any newly released book on software testing.
Regardless, it’s still fun to watch, and I’m hoping we can spend a few more days on top as the initial orders continue (hopefully) to roll in.
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The Amazon sales rank has become my new obsession. I refresh the hwtsam book page at least a dozen times a day. I smile when the numbers go up, and groan when they go down – but when they go down, I keep watching to see if they go back up again.
It’s idiotic – it’s a waste of my time – but I can’t stop. The funny thing is that I think the sales rank number (currently floating in the 32-40k range) indicates that we’re selling just a few copies a day (although as of this posting, we’re the #3 book in software testing).
If you have already received your copy, we’ll still waiting for our first review. Good or bad, we’d love to hear what you have to say.
And if you don’t have a copy, what are you waiting for?
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I would bet that all first time authors wait for the day when they their work is finally available – when they can actually see and hold the product they’ve been working on. My book was shipped to the printers a month ago, and I was told that it would be “in the distribution channel” by December 10.
So, since Wednesday, I’ve been checking the online book stores to see if they have it – but they don’t. One site even removed it from their inventory. Amazon says that a 3rd party has it, but it seems strange that anyone would get it before Amazon. Finally, I checked the MSPress site, and although they say it will be available for order on Dec. 3, you can’t order the book on the site. My only conclusion is that “in the distribution channel” doesn’t mean that the book is actually available.
This is kind of a bummer, since I’m giving a talk to the Team Test SIG on Monday about testing at MS, and we were hoping to give away copies of the book. This afternoon, I got a thanks you reminder email from one of the organizers, and I replied and apologized to him about the book not being available quite in time for the event. His reply was”
“What are you talking about? I have 40 copies in my office.”
It didn’t take much for me to convince him to give me one, so I now hold in my hand, a copy of my book. It’s still a bit surreal, but it also finally feels real. It’s bigger than I thought it would be (final page count just a bit over 400, with 260 of those penned by me).
It’s funny – the tester in me wants to go through and point out everything I don’t like about it, but I’d rather let any readers draw their own conclusions. In fact, I’m hoping people buy the book and ask questions and hold me accountable. Eventually, I really hope that enough people buy copies that I can write a second edition and fix all of the tiny things I want to get right.
For now, the book in my hand is enough. I have an open bottle of Champagne waiting for me and just a bit more time to savor this moment before I need to get back to reality.
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When it rains it really does pour. If, for some strange reason you can't get enough of my writing, I have a flurry of print activity all happening at once.
I have been published in the November/December issue of IEEE Transactions on Software. To be fair, I'm in the author list, but my role was to run the "experiment". The abstract is here, if you're an IEEE member you can get at the full article.
I'm also in Better Software this month. I wrote a"Last Word" article called "The Abolition of Ignorance" - relating Armour's 5 orders of ignorance with software testing. Full article is online here (my article is last - hence the title of the column).
And last, but definitely not least, I'm freakin' ecstatic to announce <<drum roll ..... >>
Somewhere over the last year or so, I wrote a book. Two of my colleagues, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison contributed, but I got to own the architecture and design (so to speak) - as well as about 300 pages of drivel on some of the things we care about in testing at MS. It's available for pre-order as of tomorrow, and should be on shelves by the end of next week.
There will certainly be a flurry of follow up posts on the book, but for now, I'll leave it like this.
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