Nothing like an inflamatory title. I can’t claim credit for it though as you will soon see.

Every organization has documents that new employees are given to read. These are generally things like ‘coding standards’, ‘bug severity definitions’, etc. I’m starting to collect a list of articles which I would consider required reading for testers when they join any organization I work for.

My original required article I have is The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky. As more of the english world realizes they are a minority on the Internet, Unicode is going to be a bigger and bigger deal. It’s also one of those things that is very painful if you don’t do it right the first time.

Recently I’ve started passing Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All to the list. See, theres the inspiration for the title. As soon as you start doing any sort of metrics, or performance/load/stress testing you will be entering the wonderful world of statistics. I’m no expert in stats (I took it once in college and twice in university and still ended up with a D-) but I know enough to be dangerous which is more than a lot of testers I have met.

Anyone else have similar pages bookmarked to share? I’m thinking the list needs something that nicely wraps up the current security issues online, PKI, databases and the mechanics of web servers.