Blog

AST Election Nominations are Open!

AST Election Nominations are Open!

The Association for Software Testing is looking for new board members and one of them could be you! Ooh, I quite fancy that! Great! To nominate yourself or someone else for the upcoming election you need to know that: nominees must have been AST Members continuously...

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CAST 2023 Blind Bird Tickets Available

CAST 2023 Blind Bird Tickets Available

CAST 2023 Blind Bird Tickets are now available! Get ahead of the game and save big with our Blind Bird Tickets! These exclusive tickets are available now at a steep discount before the program is finalized. By purchasing Blind Bird Tickets, you'll show your commitment...

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CAST 2023 CFP

CAST 2023 CFP

The call for participation in CAST 2023 is open and we'd love to hear from you! We are looking for a broad and diverse scope of submissions and we strongly encourage and prefer proposals based on personal experiences. We want talks that engage people in deep...

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API Testing: From Entry Level to PhD

API Testing: From Entry Level to PhD

This is a transcript of API Testing: From Entry Level to PhD from November 6th, 2018 by Jason Ioannides. You can find the video in our YouTube channel. API Testing: from Entry Level to PhD Today we're gonna be talking about API testing and we're gonna do so and at the...

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The Often Overlooked Test Oracle

The Often Overlooked Test Oracle

This is a transcript of The Often Overlooked Test Oracle webinar from May 3, 2019 by Doug Hoffman. You can find the video in our YouTube channel. The Often Overlooked Test Oracle Oh good morning afternoon or evening or night as the case may be, in the next 45 minutes...

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Career Day

Career Day

Join us May 21 for AST Career Day! We will present five short talks from experienced hiring managers about Recruiting, Interviewing, Hiring, and Promotion. Speakers include Dan Ashby, Ash Coleman, Chris Kenst, Eric Proegler, and James Thomas. We will assemble the...

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Press Releases

AST and BCS Peer Conference Considers Whether the Public Should Care About Software Testing

The Association for Software Testing (AST) and The BCS Special Interest Group in Software Testing (SIGIST) have released a joint report that suggests the public should be deeply invested in the quality of software, if not necessarily the discipline of software testing. The public is constantly exposed to risks from poor software quality, including in life-critical contexts.

Software impacts our world in so many ways it is hardly worth enumerating, but the newest risks are enough to require serious examination. Machine learning algorithms are exploding in use as their cost and difficulty to implement plummet, preventing even the people implementing them from truly understanding their inner workings and predicting their outputs, by their very nature. Social media is fracturing our society with these generated algorithms, and we do not yet know how that story ends.

Data sets used to train these algorithms are both deliberately and inadvertently simplified and carelessly selected, baking in biases and blind spots. These algorithms are being aggressively married with audio and video surveillance in public spaces, workplaces, and educational settings. Vehicle automation may yet prove to be safer per mile than manual control in the aggregate, but that is little comfort when contemplating the rush to deploy fully automated vehicles on our streets, seas, and for air travel. Robotics and further automation against machine learning outputs will introduce risks we do not yet fully appreciate.

The public must be able to trust that experts have exercised good judgement about where, what, how, why, and when to test, that this testing has been conducted by skilled and curious testers with sufficient subject matter expertise, and testing results are properly communicated to and consumed by decision makers who decide whether or not and when to release software. This testing must center users and the public, not just commercial considerations.

The report proposes three approaches for establishing public trust — push, publicise, and punish. Pushes are applied up front to influence behaviour during the development of a product, publication puts information into the public domain to help consumers ask the right kinds of questions, and punishments discourage undesirable behaviour and introduce additional practices to attempt to prevent similar problems in the future.

Regulations codifying testing process standards are usually proposed as counterweights to the commercial pressures to release software as soon as it appears to work correctly, under expected conditions – at least for the most important use cases. Standards can fit into all three categories of push, publicise, and punish, but they can be difficult to broadly apply and may contribute to goal displacement by optimizing testing for generating proof that records of prescribed activities exist, as opposed to optimizing for deep examination and thoroughness in testing.

In the software testing community, there has been controversy over the ISO 29119 standard for software testing. The report notes that if a testing standard is expected to be a proxy for a product quality standard, then it is risking trying to drive software development from the back of the bus. Narrow standards intelligently applied for specific subject matter or contexts could be very helpful. Broad standards applied without consideration of context can be unhelpful or worse.

The Association for Software Testing (AST) is an organization for and by professional software testers that is creating community, boosting careers, and promoting the science and craft of software testing. Learn more at https://associationforsoftwaretesting.org

The BCS Special Interest Group in Software Testing (SIGIST) is the software testing specialist group of the British Computer Society. SIGIST promotes the importance of testing, develops an awareness of good practices recognised within the industry, represents the interests of the Group’s members with other bodies, encourages research into testing, promotes high standards of professionalism and excellence within testing, and promotes diversity within the industry generally. Learn more at https://www.bcs.org/membership/member-communities/software-testing-specialist-group/