A Year without the Yankees

If you are a baseball fan, there is a chance you might know the answer to this little piece of trivia. When was the last time the New York Yankees failed to reach the playoffs? The answer, 1993; the same year the Toronto Blue Jays won their second consecutive World Series. There were no wild card teams or Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Florida Marlins were in their first year of existence and Jim Abbott (born without a right hand) pitched a no-hitter against the Indians.

In 1993, Bill Clinton succeeded George H. Bush as the President of the United States, Unforgiven won best picture at the Academy Awards and the Montreal Canadians won their 24th Stanley Cup beating the Los Angeles Kings in the finals and Seinfeld was TV royalty. On the computer and technology front, it was a year that started the evolution of our lives, The World Wide Web is released by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), Windows NT 3.1, the first version of Microsoft's line of Windows NT operating systems, is released to manufacturing and id Software releases Doom, a first-person shooter that uses advanced 3D graphics for computer games setting the standard for future games.

On the Quality Assurance front, Mercury Interactive (bought by HP) had shipped the first versions of their products two years earlier and wouldn’t hit stride financially for another 6 years. WinRunner had been released, Test Director (now Quality Center) and Load Runner existed in only their first versions. There was no thoughts of any automated web testing tools as the Internet was just released (the first versions were released in 1996). For QA process and methodology, “Testing Computer Software” by C. Kaner, J Falk and H. Nguven was republished as a 2nd edition (verbatim of the original 1998 version). This book was the standard reference for the testing field and included topics on test case design, test planning, project life cycle overview, software errors, boundary conditions, bug reports, regression testing, black box testing, software quality and reliability, managing test teams, printer testing, internationalization, and managing legal risk.

In explicitly, 16 years later this classic book is still used as a reference guide (I have seen it used by non QA resources and executives as a reference and a guide for QA), even though it is out of date and out of print. It uses examples of MS-DOS and testing dot-matrix printers. It even advocates a “wait and see” approach to the “Microsoft Test” application and the “fad” of automated testing. In fact, automated testing is now a staple of any testing strategy.
For all the gains in technology, process, methodology, the changes in types of testing, and use of automated testing, QA is hopelessly deadlocked and stalled because of this standard reference. The technology field has relied so heavily on this book that there is no longer any evolution and development teams have assumed a dominant role in IT organizations, a la Darwin. Books like "What would Google Do?" are swooped off of shelves and read by product managers, search and advertising executives, human resources and of course engineering teams. These books evangelize changes in how to do business in the new media world, yet there is not a matching book for Quality {QA} in the new world. QA needs a new reference, a new standard, a game changer and I'll write it if I have to.