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

• Using mind-mapping software as a visual test management tool by Aaron Hodder - "I want to be able to give and receive as much information as I can in the limited amount of time I have and communicate it in a way that is respectful of others' time and resources. These are my values and what I think constitutes responsible testing."

• Healthcare.gov and the Tyranny of the Innocents by James Bach - "Management created the conditions whereby this project was 'delivered' in a non-working state. Not like the Dreamliner. The 787 had some serious glitches, and Boeing needs to shape that up. What I’m talking about is boarding an aircraft for a long trip only to be told by the captain 'Well, folks it looks like we will be stuck here at the gate for a little while. Maintenance needs to install our wings and engines. I don’t know much about aircraft building, but I promise we will be flying by November 30th. Have some pretzels while you wait.'"

• Software Testers Are Test Pilots by John Hunter - "Software testers should be test pilots. Too many people think software testing is the pre-flight checklist an airline pilot uses."

• Where to begin? by Katrina Clokie - "Then you need to grab your Product Owner and anyone else with an interest in testing (perhaps architect, project manager or business analyst, dependent on your team). I'm not sure what your environment is like, usually I'd book an hour meeting to do this, print out my mind map on an A3 page and take it in to a meeting room with sticky notes and pens. First tackle anything that you've left a question mark next to, so that you've fleshed out the entire model, then get them to prioritise their top 5 things that they want you to test based on everything that you could do."

• Being a Software Tester in Scrum by Dave McNulla - "Pairing on development and testing strengthens both team members. With people crossing disciplines, they improve understanding of the product, the code, and what other stakeholders find important."

• Stop Writing Code You Can’t Yet Test by Dennis Stevens - "The goal is not to write code faster. The goal is to produce valuable, working, testing, remediated code faster. The most expensive thing developers can do is write code that doesn’t produce something needed by anyone (product, learning, etc). The second most expensive thing developers can do is write code that can’t be tested right away."

• Is Healthcare.gov security now fixed? by Ben Simo - "I am very happy that the most egregious issue was immediately fixed. Others issues remain. The vulnerabilities I've listed above are defects that should not make it to production. It doesn't take a security expert or “super hacker” to exploit these vulnerabilities. This is basic web security. Most of these are the kinds of issues that competent web developers try to avoid; and in the rare case that they are created, are usually found by competent testers."

• Embracing Chaos Testing Helps Create Near-Perfect Clouds - "Chaos Monkey works on the simple premise that if we need to design for high availability, we should design for failure. To design for failure, there should be ways to simulate failures as they would happen in real-world situations. This is exactly what a Chaos Monkey helps achieve in a cloud setup.
  Netflix recently made the source code of Chaos Monkey (and other Simian Army services) open source and announced that more such monkeys will be made available to the community."

• Bugs in UK Post Office System had Dire Consequences - "A vocal minority of sub-postmasters have claimed for years that they were wrongly accused of theft after their Post Office computers apparently notified them of shortages that sometimes amounted to tens of thousands of pounds. They were forced to pay in the missing amounts themselves, lost their contracts and in some cases went to jail. Second Sight said the Post Office's initial investigation failed at first to identify the root cause of the problems. The report says more help should have been given to sub-postmasters, who had no way of defending themselves."

• Traceability Matrix: Myth and Tricks by Adam Howard - "And this is where we get to the crux of the problem with traceability matrices. They are too simplistic a representation of an impossibly complex thing. They reduce testing to a series of one to one relationships between intangible ideas. They allow you to place a number against testing. A percentage complete figure. What they do not do is convey the story of the testing."

• Six Tips for Your Software Testing Career by John Hunter - "Read what software testing experts have written. It’s surprising how few software testers have read books and articles about software testing.Here are some authors (of books, articles and blogs) that I've found particularly useful..."