Most testing companies offer nothing to the community or the field of testing. They all seem to say they hire only the best experts, but only a very few of them are willing to back that up with evidence. Testing companies, by and large, are all the same, and the sameness is one of mediocrity and mendacity.
But there are a few exceptions. One of them is TestInsane, founded by ex-Moolyan co-founder Santosh Tuppad. This is a company to watch.
The wonderful thing about TestInsane is their mindmaps. More than 100 of them. What lovelies! Check them out. They are a fantastic public contribution! Each mindmap tackles some testing-related subject and lists many useful ideas that will help you test in that area.
I am working on a guide to bug reporting, and I found three maps on their site that are helping me cover all the issues that matter. Thank you TestInsane!
I challenge other testing companies to contribute to the craft, as well.
Note: Santosh offered me money to help promote his company. That is a reasonable request, but I don’t do those kinds of deals. If I did that even once I would lose vital credibility. I tell everyone the same thing: I am happy to work for you if you pay me, but I cannot promote you unless I believe in you, and if I believe in you I will promote you for free. As of this writing, I have not done any work for TestInsane, paid or otherwise, but it could happen in the future.
I have done paid work for Moolya, and Per Scholas, both of which I gush about on a regular basis. I believe in those guys. Neither of them pay me to say good things about them, but remember, anyone who works for a company will never say bad things. There are some other testing companies I have worked for that I don’t feel comfortable endorsing, but neither will I complain about them in public (usually… mostly).
Thank you very much James for posting this 🙂 We will continue to do better in every way! 🙂 This blog post is motivational for us. It means a lot to hear this from you.
Excellent, this will definitely give our sporadic exploratory testing some much needed structured and elegant mindset / path to follow when it comes to hulking out during testing.
Thanks for the recommendation; the mindmaps and the site in general are incredibly useful! I would caution anyone thinking of signing up for an account, however: the password requirements for the simple site are more complex than my bank’s, and I spent at least 5-8 minutes trying to type something twice that I might have some hope of remembering 😉 And once done, you’re rather unceremoniously ushered to two different ads that don’t return you back to the site. That was rough, but the content, once found, is pretty nifty!
[James’ Reply: I passed your comments on to TestInsane and I’m told they made some changes.
To the issue of ads Santhosh replies: “I did not understand this as we are not showing any ads. I am trying to find in the code if any JS additions are there, I did not find anything there which relates to ads. Even my developer said same thing, but we are still brainstorming on possibilities.”
Later he added: “Removed some site meter script as we are using Google Analytics anyways. Sitemeter appeared to have some fishy redirection stuff. It was not needed and removed it.”]
Thanks for the recommendation, James. I have myself been referring to some of the great mindmaps TestInsane have produced (kudos to Santosh and team for that!) for my blog post ideas and its been always useful getting more insights into a particular topic!
Cheers
Truly impressive. Have bookmarked it and shared with my team as well.