Not a day without Mooc being mentioned. Thought it was about time to try one. So I just started Udacity course on software testing. And it was quite a surprise to see how the topic is opened up. No long definition of the different types of tests (black box, white box, exploratory, manual, automated…). The first examples are unit-test-like ! the first tester is the developer and the first test are codes, hence (automated) unit-like tests. That can seem obvious but general acceptance of software testing is a bit different. Here is a section of the wikipedia article about software testing :

“Software testing, depending on the testing method employed, can be implemented at any time in the development process. Traditionally most of the test effort occurs after the requirements have been defined and the coding process has been completed, but in the Agile approaches most of the test effort is on-going”

So the whole Agile/XP way of programming is becoming so mainstream that it is not mentioned and is just the way software testing is presented.

Will see how is the rest of the course goes…