The Hexawise Software Testing carnival focuses on sharing interesting and useful blog posts related to software testing.

• Testing and Checking Refined by James Bach and Michael Bolton - "a robust role for tools in testing must be embraced. As we work toward a future of skilled, powerful, and efficient testing, this requires a careful attention to both the human side and the mechanical side of the testing equation. Tools can help us in many ways far beyond the automation of checks. But in this, they necessarily play a supporting role to skilled humans; and the unskilled use of tools may have terrible consequences."

• Bugs Spread Disease by Elisabeth Hendrickson - "Cancel all the bug triage meetings; spend the time instead preventing and fixing defects. Test early and often to find the bugs earlier. Fix bugs as soon as they’re identified."

• Becoming a World-Class Tester by Ilari Henrik Aegerter - "World-class testing means following the urge to get to the bottom of things, not giving up until you have experienced enough value for yourself, thinking more expansively about the role of a tester, and thinking non-traditionally about what skills are required to thrive in the role."

• Test Coverage Triage by Parimala Hariprasad - "My experience shows that a mind map based test design works great at this stage. Business teams will be thrilled to have a Visual Walkthrough of tests and provide inputs quickly. As a participant observer on several dozen IT projects, I have found out that testers’ personally walking them through the tests works really well."

• What Does it Take to Change the Software Testing Industry? Courage! by Keith Klain - "According to Mark Twain, courage is not the absence of fear – but the mastery of it. There are people working in software testing all over the globe who are questioning long standing ways of working - some for the first time. Get yourself energized and get involved."

• Explaining Exploratory Testing Relies On Good Notes. by Rob Lambert - "Being able to do good exploratory testing is one thing, being able to explain this testing (and the insights it brings) to the people that matter is a different set of skills. I believe many testers are ignoring and neglecting the communication side of their skills, and it’s a shame because it may be directly affecting the opportunities they have to do exploratory testing in the first place."

• Human-Computer Cooperation by John Hunter - "people are better at figuring out interesting ideas to test. Once those are identified, those test conditions and other test ideas need to be combined together and put into tests. Generating a highly efficient, maximally varied, minimally repetitive set of tests based on a given set of test inputs is something computer algorithms are more effective at than a person."

• Software testing can be sexy, too by Ole Lensmar - "What Klain, who serves on the board of the AST, and the others would like to do is not only bring those skills back home but increase the availability and accessibility of this kind of training and job opportunity. Ideally, colleges and universities would start offering majors in Software Testing so we can set young people on a path toward testing as a career."

• Yet another future of testing post (YAFOTP) by Alan Page - "I think we’ll always need people to look at big end-to-end scenarios and determine how non-functional attributes (e.g. performance, privacy, usability, reliability, etc.) contribute to the user experience. Some of this evaluation will come from manually walking through scenarios), but there will be plenty of need for programmatic measurement and analysis as well..."