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"Value to career" is a tough thing to call. I don't have a certification, and as far as I know, I've never hired anyone with a certification. That could be due to my location, or just a coincidence, or could be a point demonstrating their lack of value. I do know that I've never considered ISTQB/ISEB Certification of any value while reviewing candidates' ...

testerab, Great question. I'm a huge believer in these kinds of activities. You Would Enjoy Spending Time with Markus Gärtner When I think of the software testing community's response to code katas, I think of the prolific testing blogger Markus Gartner and his involvement in promoting Testing Dojos. They are collaborative, facilitated, group exercises ...

One of my favourites is Parkcalc ... Parkcalc is a real world application for calculating how much your parking is going to cost at the Gerald R. Ford international airport. It is also full of bugs, yet it works mostly. The requirements come in the form of the parking brochure. So you don't pound the real one into the gound there are a couple of self hosted ...

Java Bean, I think you may want to ask yourself a few questions first: do you want to be involved in testing or in programming? In my experience, colleges are usually less than stellar in the QA domain, and tend to assume that testing is "any warm body" and useful to familiarize someone with an application before they start coding with it. do you like ...

I am aware of the current "certification is evil" line going through the software testing community. I have to say that, I don't agree with this line. As user246 mentioned, people do occaisionally attain this certification to be more marketable. People also often sometimes take this certification early in their careers in the hopes of learning more. ...

Unfortunately, the Selenium site itself does not provide much educational material. Judging from your blog, you are more interested in Selenium as a Java API than as a capture/playback tool. I think that is the right choice, but it does require some programming skills. Your blog has articles on elementary Java programming, e.g. "Branching Statements in ...

One of my favourites is Parkcalc ... Parkcalc is a real world application for calculating how much your parking is going to cost at the Gerald R. Ford international airport. It is also full of bugs, yet it works mostly. The requirements come in the form of the parking brochure. So you don't pound the real one into the gound there are a couple of self hosted ...

your idea is great but has a big flaw : What if you prepare your training and the makers of the game update it the day before, fixing the bugs ? There is a solution : You should find an open source game which you could download, and then run a controlled version hosted by yourself. You could even add bugs yourself and provide an "update" in mid-course to ...

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught - Oscar Wilde If the effort you make to acquire certifications in the field of software testing in it's current form would encourgae you read more relevant stuff related to testing and you firmly believe that is going to help you think ...

Does it mean you can test? As has already been stated above several times, certainly not. Does it help? I can't really think of any situations where it would be a negative (at the worst, a non-factor maybe), so it certainly can't affect your employability - which, let's face it, is a rather important part of the "software testing career" experience. On ...

Well... No, in my opinion the ISTQB Foundation level certification does not guarantee that you can test. Learning the specifics of the job requires practice, depth of knowledge, experience, etc. ISTQB preparation teaches you basic terminology. Processes and even testing techniques are not covered well... Anyway, think about it that way: "ISTQB does not ...

You could look up Testing Dojo's as well, and add another URL to the answer list: http://testing-challenges.org./tiki-index.php Some Programming Katas might be useful as well, I believe there used to be a few Ruby Kata's that were more geared towards testing but that was a few years ago and I don't know what the state of those are now. Edit 1: Ruby Kata ...

Anything is good practice for QA. It doesn't even need to be software. I have tried all sorts of QA approaches on the elevators in my office building, as their code is buggy as hell. I'll admit that it's a difficult question for me to answer, though, because I can't really turn my "QA sense" off at all. It's constantly running, looking at how things work ...

Microsoft has sample databases for exactly this purpose: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23654 http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms124501%28v=sql.105%29.aspx There are tons of samples, tutorials and training online that all use these sample databases. It sounds like everything you want from above could be done with these and ...

http://www.hackthissite.org/pages/index/index.php Googles site for security testing: http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/ - really useful. Try going through both sites with a copy of the book suggested by Alan - they really complement each other.

If you are a member of AST (the Association for Software Testing) or just want to do the self-study method I'd recommend taking a look at the Black Box Software Testing courses: http://www.testingeducation.org/BBST/ - free online materials http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/training/courses/ - AST's training information There are several ...

Bryce, If you go to Alan's blog you'll find a small application there that he deliberately seeded with a couple of errors. That's probably a good starting point for functional black-box testing, although it will be rather time-consuming if you're looking at manual functional testing. Another good option for training purposes is to check things like any ...

No, absolutely. The problem with ISTQB Syllabus is that it does not really reflect modern approaches and methodologies (especially in agile environments). I attended ISTQB training recently myself and I must say that at least half of it was useless (problems that were mentioned do not exist in agile team to which I belong). But... Although it does not say ...

Usually social networks / web mail services have a nice many-different-fields reg forms, e.g.: http://mail.yandex.ru/ http://e.mail.ru/cgi-bin/signup?from=main BTW, SO profile page: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1953175/peter-l is a nicest thing to train your cases creation skills, since there are many "hidden" parts, tabs and features which may be quite ...

Svetlana, since most publicly-available registration forms for large websites fit your criteria, I'd imagine you could use any of them. You might also consider some Shopping-Carts. Many file upload/download forms (such as those for photos, etc) meet your criteria. Good luck.

While you need DB instance for SQL training purposes, you can look at small solution like SQLite http://sqlitestudio.pl/?act=download . Off course it can't be compared with Oracle or MS SQL Server. But it has enough functions for SQL trainings and you can easy create/restore structure from previously created SQL Script. Maybe you can use it for small ...

I'm currently enrolled in the BBST Foundations class through the Association of Software Testing. It's a great course on the basics of software testing - oracles, heuristics, impossiblity of complete testing, etc. It's an online class that uses the free materials from Cem Kaner's research published here. It is an online class but it uses a lot of group work ...

Its very fortunate that you have been able to walk-through all the books mentioned in your question. Once you have also gone through the useful suggestions provided in the earlier post, which I am sure you would be able to run through /grasp in no time, you could try adding another crucial ingredient to your learning ,that would "test" your learning and ...

Ok, I'll bite! I think this odd cat shooting a bow golf game will suit your needs. Its really simple and quite fun (with a few bugs of course) http://www.addictinggames.com/sports-games/catwithbowgolf.jsp As a bonus a great buggy real life app is hosted by Adam Goucher. The Parking Calculalor is probably one of the buggiest apps I've ever seen and its ...

I have a question for you...what if your "testers" find no bugs in the software under test despite all the planning techniques. How will you explain this to your students? And how will you go about resolving this? Are you planning on testing the software (using the same planning techniques you want to teach) and find some bugs so you can compare?

I don't know about online games, but if you have access to an Ubuntu machine, you could browse their software centre. There are a whole bunch of applications of all kinds, including several games. These range from relatively simple 2D scrolling games to OpenArena, a 3D FPS. They're mostly free, and available for download. I'm sure that given the range of ...

By far your best choice is to create your own "buggy" application. That way, you can ensure which bugs are present, and what types of bugs (UI bugs, back-end bugs, security bugs, etc) can be found. You could do that by grabbing an open-source project and modifying it for your new testers. If you were to grab a public version of a buggy application, it ...

No, but it normally proves, you that you will understand what the ISTQB test manager and the other ISTQB tester mean. Many project managers think that testing is that obvious that one need no education for it, it is certainly wrong. A big value is - one would not disturb good testing process by implementing his not-understanding about testing and qa.

I have also have been on the foundation course and feel that it presented no gain in my career. The course however would have been of great help when I had first started my career as a software tester. It highlights some of the basic techniques that can be applied and tries to put the concepts behind testing into perspective. I am sure that "anyone" could ...

No, a testing certificate doesn't prove you can test. Having said that, I have sat (and passed) the ISEB Foundation and Intermediate levels and the ISTQB Advanced Test Analyst. For each of those I read a bunch of books and articles, then paid to sit the exam. It was definitely worth reading the books - I learned some useful things. I think it was just about ...