Software testing guides for professional testers
Practitioner-grade reference guides on test management, test automation, agile testing and testing techniques, each built around the numbers, tables and figures a test lead would put in a slide. And the honest archive of Testing Experience, the magazine that carried this name from 2008 to 2014.
The hubs
| Mark | Hub | What it covers | Size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test Management Guides | Planning, strategy, risk, estimation, process and the numbers that justify all of it. Seven guides for the person who has to decide what gets tested, by whom, for how long, and then defend the decision. | 7 guides | |
| Test Automation Guides | What to automate, in which layer, with what kind of tool, and how to keep the suite trustworthy once it exists. Six guides on the engineering side of testing, written to stay true as products come and go. | 6 guides | |
| Agile Testing Guides | How testing works when there is no test phase. Six guides on the tester's role, the collaborative practices that replace hand-offs, and the artefacts (charters, example tables, a definition of done) that keep quality visible sprint after sprint. | 6 guides | |
| Software Testing Techniques Guides | The techniques themselves: how to design cases that find defects with the fewest tests, how to test security, performance and mobile behaviour, and how to measure what the testing achieved. Seven guides, each with a worked example. | 7 guides | |
| Testing AI Systems and Authenticity Pipelines | Testing applied to the systems that claim to prove who made a piece of content, how it was made and whether it was altered or generated. Twenty-seven guides: detector benchmarks, base rates, thresholds and intervals on one side; Content Credentials pipelines, metadata survival, disclosure labels and evidence-grade test records on the other. | 27 guides | |
| Testing Experience Magazine: The Archive | From March 2008 to December 2014, Testing Experience was a free quarterly PDF magazine for professional testers, published in Berlin. This hub records all 28 issues, the tutorial series and the sister title, and explains what happened to the subscriptions. | 28 issues, 12 records |
Latest figures
Every guide opens with a figure built from its own numbers. The three newest.
Most read guides
The pages people search for most: plans, security, the pyramid, exploratory sessions, done, performance.
How to write a test plan that survives review
A test plan is the document a reviewer reads to decide whether the testing you propose is enough.
Test ManagementPractitioner, 8 minSecurity testing: types, OSSTMM and where it fits in delivery
Security testing is not one activity but five, run at different points of the lifecycle by different people, and a penetration test is only the last and most expensive of them.
Testing TechniquesPractitioner, 7 minTest automation pyramid: ratios, costs and when to break it
The test automation pyramid is a budgeting device for automated checks.
Test AutomationPractitioner, 7 minExploratory testing: how to write charters and run sessions
Exploratory testing is simultaneous learning, test design and execution: you decide the next test based on what the last one showed you.
Agile TestingPractitioner, 5 minDefinition of done: layered checklists for story, sprint, release
A definition of done is the team's shared, checkable agreement about what finished means.
Agile TestingPractitioner, 5 minPerformance testing: types, workload models and p95 results
Most performance tests fail before they run, because the workload does not resemble production and the pass criterion is an average.
Testing TechniquesPractitioner, 7 min
What this site is
Testing Experience was a free quarterly magazine for professional software testers, published in Berlin across 28 issues between March 2008 and December 2014. Its issue files were shared on security mailing lists, cited on developer blogs, catalogued by research repositories and summarized by tester communities in a dozen languages. Publication stopped in 2014 and the site lapsed a few years later. In 2026 the domain was relaunched, under new and independent ownership, as the knowledge base you are reading: the same audience, the same subject, a format that is open all the time instead of four times a year behind a registration wall.
The guides are organized into the four themes the magazine returned to most, plus a fifth hub, testing AI systems and authenticity pipelines, that applies the same methods to classifiers, detectors, language-model features and the provenance systems (Content Credentials, file metadata, disclosure labels) that claim to show who made a piece of content and whether it was altered or generated. Each guide opens with a figure or a table rather than a preamble, carries a quick answer and the key figures in a card beside the text, states its sources by name, and answers the five to seven questions people actually search for on the subject. None of them names a vendor or a product, because tool landscapes turn over and the reasoning should not. Every page carries the name of the editor responsible for it and the month it was last reviewed.
If you arrived here from an old link to an issue PDF, a subscribe page or a tutorial listing, the redirect brought you to the page that most honestly matches what the link pointed to: an issue record that says who cited that issue and why, or the current guide on the same subject. The magazine hub explains the archive; the about page explains who runs the site now and how it is edited.
The magazine, by the numbers
| Issue | Date | Original file | Ref. domains | Theme as cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Issue 1 | March 2008 | testingexperience01_08.pdfissues/testingexperience01_03_08.pdf | 21 | Launch issue; test management articles |
| Issue 4 | December 2008 | testingexperience04_08.pdfissues/testingexperience04_12_08.pdf | 21 | not established |
| Issue 12 | December 2010 | testingexperience12_12_10.pdfissues/testingexperience12_12_10.pdf | 19 | Open source testing tools |
| Issue 6 | June 2009 | testingexperience02_09.pdfissues/testingexperience06_06_09.pdf | 15 | Security testing |
| Issue 7 | September 2009 | testingexperience03_09.pdfissues/testingexperience07_09_09.pdf | 15 | Agile testing |
| Issue 13 | March 2011 | testingexperience13_03_11.pdfissues/testingexperience13_03_11.pdf | 14 | Test domains |
| Issue 19 | September 2012 | testingexperience19_09_12.pdfissues/testingexperience19_09_12.pdf | 14 | not established |
| Issue 23 | September 2013 | issues/testingexperience23_09_13.pdf | 13 | Product review |
Common questions
Who is this site for?
Working software testers, test leads and test managers who know the vocabulary and want specific, checkable guidance with figures and sources, not introductions to what testing is.
Is this the Testing Experience magazine?
It is the same domain and name, relaunched in 2026 under independent ownership. The magazine stopped in 2014. This site keeps an evidence-based record of every issue and publishes current guides on its subjects; it does not distribute the original PDFs.
Why are there no tool names in the guides?
Tool landscapes change every few years and vendor mentions date a page. The guides describe categories, criteria and reasoning so that they stay true; the evaluation checklists help you judge any specific tool.
Does this site cover AI detection and content authenticity?
Yes, as a testing subject. The testing AI systems hub measures detectors, watermarks, Content Credentials pipelines and disclosure labels with evaluation sets, thresholds and confidence intervals. It never claims that any of those systems is reliable, never claims that any tool defeats them, and reviews no products.
How are the guides reviewed?
Each is written and reviewed by the named editor against current standards (ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119, ISTQB syllabi, TMMi) and the books cited in its sources list, and shows its last review month. Corrections are welcome through the contribute page.
Can I reuse the figures and tables?
Yes, for internal documents, training and presentations, with a credit to testingexperience.com. See the terms page for the full permission.