Sprint 3: What non-testing focussed book do you wish you’d been given on your first day testing

Kicking off today 2018-05-30 finishing 2018-06-13

Have fun with this one people!

That’s a tough one Dom! Mainly because I don’t really read books :stuck_out_tongue:

For my fellow cynics, I’ll suggest Robert Thompson’s “Up The Organization” as a guide to recognising good and bad management.

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I have two “go-to” books on the general conduct of business. One is Miyamoto Mushashi’s guide to strategy for samurai, “A Book of Five Rings”. The second is virtually any collection of Scott Adams’ ‘Dilbert’ cartoons (though the earliest, “Build a better life through stealing office supplies”, is probably the one I still think of the most). Between the two, you will learn almost everything you need to know about working and surviving in a big organisation.

Anyone working in the UK Government sector needs two other books; Anthony King & Ivor Crewe’s “The Blunders of our Governments”, and any of Anthony Jay’s novelisations of the 1970s/80s tv sitcoms, “Yes, Minister” (and its sequel, “Yes, Prime Minister”). Anyone engaged in IT testing in the UK Government sector is unlikely to be able to apply any of the lessons in these books, as the decisions that affect testers in such situations will have been taken way above their pay grade and will most likely not take any operational considerations into account; but reading these books will help you come to terms with the stuff that happens on an almost daily basis!

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“The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim. Superb book that really pulls you through the story line and sets up a good summary for an ‘agile’ (lower case ‘a’) mindset.

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Starting on mine - Practical Physics by G.L. Squires

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https://dominic-kua.github.io/Non_testing_book.html

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I applaud your choice - I read Bindsight just a few months back and I was fairly well blown away by it. I think few will have heard of it because Peter Watts has not been published here in the UK until the sequel, Echopraxia, was picked up for UK publication and his publishers realised that they had to let a wider readership see the prequel. Watts is fairly big in his native Canada, and people with access to import copies had raved sufficiently about Blindsight for the publishers to take a punt on it. I’m so pleased they did.

My review here: https://deepwatersreading.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/blindsight-by-peter-watts/

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I got it on kindle a few years ago and I have to say it was revelatory.

It’s a philosophy book with a story and a good slice of science, I really like his books, though they’re not easy reading.

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Coaching Habit, Influence, Being an Adult in Relationships, and Never Split the Difference. Would have saved a lot of time and pain and prevented me stumbling into my own version of some of these ideas. The key focus is how to work effectively with others and get what we all want to get done.

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I wrote this way to fast… I need to plan better.

http://www.qahipster.org/blog/take-a-look-its-in-a-book

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