Deconstructing Our Tools
My column Deconstructing Our Tools is featured on StickyMinds this week. It’s basically a listing of many different categories of tools. A tutorial I gave on the same subject at the SQuAD conference recently filled a large room to capacity, so it seems to be something that people find useful.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Hi Danny, that’s a great article on StickyMinds, and a very good illustration of how diversified the tester/QA skill-set and industry have become. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the Intro Summary at the top of the page didn’t read the article to see what it was actually about!
I wrote these comments on the StickyMinds article comments:
The top introductory summary (in yellow), about “Application Lifecycle Management” tools, didn’t seem to fit the article. Your article is focused on testing tools, but not the spectrum of ALM tools and not the ALM concept at all. You don’t even mention ALM anywhere in the article. I thought it was going to be an ALM article, but wasn’t. I was wondering why the intro also said “Danny Faught hasn’t quite gotten comfortable with it [ALM]” — when the article wasn’t about ALM anyway. Sounded weird. Then the article doesn’t address either of the questions posed in the intro: 1. “Does your team need an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool?” , 2. “What is an ALM tool, anyway?” Was this an intro originally created for a different article?
*But then as I said aftewards, your article itself was a treat.*
April 1st, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Good feedback, Robert. Honestly, I still don’t really know what an ALM tool is, and none of the vendor’s pitches have motivated me to learn more since this term was invented. It seems that ALM is a collection of various tools that have been around for a long time, and true, it’s much broader than testing. What I can wrap my brain around is looking at what specific tools do, so that’s what I wrote about. The tie-in to ALM is weak here at best.
Though the folks at SQE did some editing, I wrote the intro myself. It seemed like a good idea at the time….