Amazed with your passion and dedication to our software engineering discipline. I personally believe, software engineering has got the basic discipline in place. However, most of the times the discipline is overpowered by new technology tools and products.

Such a professional body is necessary to create a working bridge between academia, industry and international bodies.

A software engineering professional needs to apply the engineering discipline for the industry’s better throughput, to create better professionals in terms of intellectual capacity for tomorrow and be proud in contributing as well as imbibing international thought-leadership.

The South African ECSA was discussed in the blog entry of above, but in addition to the ECSA discussion I also wonder: What about internationally influencial associations, such as the IEEE? Is it “right” for software engineers to be associated or affiliated with the IEEE (as it is de-facto very much the case in these days)? Or should the IEEE rather be an exclusive club only for those people who are dealing with metal wires and the electrons that are flowing through them?

Oops … I certainly lost the plot with respect to testing. I’m aware of the complexity and challenges associated with testing, but I was – in my head – thinking about routine repetitive testing tasks.

Thanks for putting me right about what you meant with respect to “standardization and textbook knowledge” – I agree with you.

I had no desire to downgrade the role of the Tester. I put my little table together thinking that “testing” was the routine and manual task of running through a series of test cases developed by the analyst or designer. Your explanation has convinced me that there is a whole lot more to testing than that! My apologies to the testing fraternity.

Moreover, I feel misquoted. It is true that I referred to Tom Maibaum, however I did NOT say that “this standardization and textbook knowledge will never be achieved”, I said that it is /currently/ nowhere to be seen. If I would truly believe that this could never be achieved in any future, then I could immediately give up my job as theoretical software methodologist. In fact my everyday work is dedicated to making steps into this direction.

I find your assessment of the Testing profession surprising. The manual tester’s work is often routine and without a lot of intellectual input. But the people designing the Tests (Test Analysts, Test Managers) often have a lot more insight into the applications than any of the other mentioned professionals. The QA team often receive poor design documents from the so-called professional business analysts and are pushed to release the poorly developed application by both project managers and operation professionals.

In my experience, it is often only the QA team that stands between the end-user and the poor service delivery from poorly developed applications and poorly run infrastructure designs by architects and service managers.

In fact, in my work as a performance testing engineer, I often have a lot more insight into the design and management problems that other ICT professional create through poor management and a lack of intellectual insight into their own specialties.

There is formal qualifications for the tester. It is called the ISEB Practitioner and various levels exist.

Kind Regards

Anton Goosen