This is the second edition of our carnival that focuses on finding interesting and useful blog posts related to software testing.

• Testing != test execution by Jeff Fry - "We often talk about testing as if it’s only test execution, yet often the most interesting, challenging, skill-intensive aspects of testing are in creating a mental model that helps us understand the problem space, designing tests to quickly and effectively answer key questions, analyzing what specifically the problem is, and communicating it effectively."

• Test Mercenaries by Mike Bland - "good testing practice goes a long way towards finding and killing a lot of bugs before they can grow more expensive, and possibly multiply. The bugs that manage to pass through a healthy testing regimen are usually only the really interesting ones. Few things are less worthy of our intellectual prowess than debugging a production crash to find a head-slappingly stupid bug that a straightforward unit or integration test could’ve caught."

• The Oracle Problem and the Teaching of Software Testing by Cem Kaner - "I’ve been emphasizing the oracle problem in my testing courses for about a dozen years. I see this as one of the defining problems of software testing: one of the reasons that skilled testing is a complex cognitive activity rather than a routine activity. Most of the time, I start my courses with a survey of the fundamental challenges of software testing, including an extended discussion of the oracle problem."

• The new V-Model by Kim Ming Leung - "We design by specifying the measurements before coding but not writing the test before coding. We write code and invite user feedback before writing automated testing for these measurements. Code quality is still guaranteed because first, measurement is the design and second, we code with testing in mind (i.e. write testable code)."

• Maximizing Software Tester Value by Letting Them Spend More Time Thinking by John Hunter - "Hexawise also lets the software tester easily tune the test coverage based on what is most important. Certain factors can be emphasized, others can be de-emphasised. Knowledge is needed to decide what factors are most important, but after that designing a test plan based on that knowledge shouldn’t take up staff time, good software can take care of that time consuming and difficult task."

• Improving the State of your Testing Team: Part One – Values by Keith Klain - "Typically, the first thing out of my test teams mouths when asked “how can we improve the state of testing here”, usually relates to something that other people should do. Very few people or teams take an introspective based approach to improvement, or state their management values, but the ones that do, typically have great success.

• Interview and Book Review: How Google Tests Software by Craig Smith - "stop treating development and test as separate disciplines. Testing and development go hand in hand. Code a little and test what you built. Then code some more and test some more. Test isn’t a separate practice; it’s part and parcel of the development process itself. Quality is not equal to test. Quality is achieved by putting development and testing into a blender and mixing them until one is indistinguishable from the other."

• Introduction to test strategy (review of Rikard Edgren's presentation) by Mauri Edo - "Rikard referred to a test strategy as the outcome of the gathered and shared information plus our own thinking processes, encouraging us to find strategies for our context, learning to understand what is important for us, in our situation."

• Experience report EuroSTAR Testlab 2012 by Martin Jansson - "The testlab is very much alike our every day life as testers. We prepare and plan for many things, but when reality hits us our preparations might be in vain. Therefore it is important in being prepared for the unknown and the unexpected. Working with the testlab is a great way of practising that."

Related: Software Testing Carnival #1 - Hexawise TV blog