I have started focusing on the Hexawise blog recently. For a good part of this year we have not had much activity on the blog, but we plan to make this blog more active going forward. As part of that effort we are starting a Software Testing Blog Carnival to highlight some post on software testing that I find interesting and think others will too. Enjoy,

• Premises of Rapid Software Testing part 1 (engagement with software development), part 2 (the nature of testing as an investigative activity) and part 3 (our relationship to our clients) by Michael Bolton - "1) Software projects and products are relationships between people, who are creatures both of emotion and rational thought... 4) A test is an activity; it is a performance, not an artifact... 6) We commit to performing credible, cost-effective testing, and we will inform our clients of anything that threatens that commitment."

• We Attended Rapid Software Testing because we Want to Grow our Testing Skills at eBay by Ilari Aegerter - "Two areas I will focus on with my team in the near future: modelling and reporting. Modelling for its necessity to grasp the complexity of a big system like eBay, reporting out of the need to be able to explain what we do. You not only need to be good at testing but also at explaining what you do. A good report should give an accurate impression on what I as a tester did during the period I tested."

• Bugs Spread Disease by Elisabeth Hendrickson - "It wasn’t the bugs that killed us directly. Rather, the bugs became a pervasive infection. They hampered us, slowing down our productivity. Eventually we were paralyzed, unable to make even tiny changes safely or quickly."

• A Sticky Situation by Michael Bolton - on using agile, kanban style, system for managing the software testing workload: "The whiteboard was the center of an active discussion between programmers and project managers about the project status. After the meeting, the whiteboard and the notes on it remained as a kind of information radiator. 'I suddenly realized that if they could do that, I could too,' Paul said. He began by dividing the whiteboard into three columns: To Be Done, Work in Progress, and Done."

• A Quick Testing Challenge by Alan Page and a response, Angry Weasel Challenge, a presentation by to Figure out why TheApp.exe won't load and cause it to load by solving the problem.

• 3 Strategies to Maximize Effectiveness of Your Tests by John Hunter - "Use the MECE principle. The MECE principles states you should define your values in a way that makes each of them “Mutually Exclusive” from the others in the list (no subsets should represent any other subsets, no overlaps) and “Collectively Exhaustive” as a group (the set of all subsets, taken together, should fully encompass all items, no gaps)."

• Musings on Test Design by Alan Page - "The point is, and this is worth repeating so often, is that thinking of test automation and “human” testing as separate activities is one of the biggest sins I see in software testing today. It’s not only ineffective, but I think this sort of thinking is a detriment to the advancement of software testing."

• Creating a Shared Understanding of Testing Culture on a Social Coding Site by Leif Singer - "those learning testing in this environment write tests to make sure that a program behaves a certain way, and forget that they might also need to test how it should not behave (e.g. on invalid input)."

• Testing in Scrum with a Waterfall Interaction by Davide Noaro - "Testing each user story separately is, for me, the basis of the Agile process, even in an interaction with a Waterfall-at-end scenario like the one described. Integrating testing into the process itself is something we should do for any software development process, not only in Agile or Scrum."