I've created a nicely linkable version of the ISTQB Glossary, and would welcome feedback (and your help)

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Hi there. I’ve been writing an article about test automation, and wanted to just explain some basic terms. I thought - well, ISTQB has a glossary on their page, I’ll link there. As it turns out, the glossary is horribly and unnecessarily complicated page to use, and it took me good couple minutes to locate a hidden link that leads to a specific term’s permalink.

So I decided to try to do better than that, scraped their search results and published it on a statically generated site here: https://istqb-glossary.page. (disclaimer: at the moment I don’t claim any content on the page, all the terms point to ISTQB Glossary as their canonical links)

As such, it would be enough for my needs, but then I thought that it would be a nice place to help people just starting out with software testing and looking to investigate some terms. This is where you, my dear fellow testers come in. I’d like you to see if there are any valuable community links, videos, maybe even in-depth courses that should be linked from specific terms’ pages?

My idea is this: a newcomer asks himself “what on earth is combinatorial testing all about?”. He stumbles upon that specific page, and apart from the official definition, link to source, he also has a body of knowledge: curated articles written by experts, examples, a short explainer video, and such. So that he/she is not stuck with raw and empty, sometimes meaningless definition, but can actually get familiar with the subject.

At the bottom of every page, there’s a suggestion box. I welcome all! And if you own a page, and would like to link to the glossary page, that would be a welcome addition too!

The site is currently not monetized, but it may happen in the future, that there will be an adsense box somewhere, and maybe, if some of the valuable content you recommend is available as affiliate products, that I’ll use those as well to help pay for the domain.

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That’s really good. Duly bookmarked.

Thanks.

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Good work Adam. You will want to change the title from ISTQB glossary to something more tongue in cheek, to preven copyright problems., Since your domain name is already going to be high on the google page rank, titles should mean its still highly findable. Have you considered using a github repo for the static data backend, as a way of making it “easy contributable”? I think there are people who have managed to do this “automagically” lately now that github is so powerfull.

You might want to add a small banner advert anyway too just to cover your costs. We don’t want you to drop this site later due to it being a pain to keep it running when you change your job to pro-golfer in a future life.

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Hi Adam,

It’s interesting you picked combinatorial testing as an example. Technically the definition is correct: “A black-box test design technique in which test cases are designed to execute specific combinations of values of several parameters.”

But by itself, the definition gives a newcomer no clue about why, when or how anyone would use combinatorial testing. I suppose that you picked the example to make that point. Links to additional material are needed.

In my view there is plenty of research material on combinatorial testing, but not nearly enough for test practitioners. As a start, consider the links on https://testcover.com/pub/background/index.php .

George

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Hey @hattori. Thanks for the recommendation! As I launched an update earlier today, there’s now a form available on every term’s page that allows visitors to easily submit similar suggestions. It creates a ticket in my repo automatically, so that I can update the page at my leisure, but also keep track of the quality of submissions. I’ve already self-submitted the link that you had pointed me towards.

I will be taking all new suggestions under consideration, so all is welcome!

@conrad.braam I am considering moving just the data directory to a public repository, but it all takes time, and we’re both working with my wife, and my country closed preschools due to COVID-19. So… maybe, but definitely not now. And funny you should say that I might become a pro-golfer. My clubs are still waiting for me in a self-storage, until I find a bit of time to play again…

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The more I use your page the more useful it becomes. I’m studying for the ISTQB Foundation exam and the index in the official study guide is shockingly sparse, so your page is extremely welcome.

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@adamhepner , sure thing. Golf will never be my thing, that was just a glib comment. I have a pet project online, I host a tiny site for it, and get about $20 a year in donations which covers the domain registration nicely, but I feel guilty that I only ever update the page once a decade, which is probably the same point that I last recompiled the app. So very wary of the cost of maintenance.

Golf is my hard line in the sand, ever crossing it means I have gone crazy and need to reboot. Going to do a quick visit and get some tickets raised on your glossary in penance for that thought now.
/edit Also hope you are all still well in your household.

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I’m studying for the ISTQB foundation, this is going to be a good resource to aid my studies. Thank you. @adamhepner

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