A Word About This Book

When Patrick Copeland originally suggested that I write this book, I was hesitant to do so, and my reasons all turned out to be good ones. People would question whether I was the best Googler to write it. (They did.) Too many people would want to get involved. (This also turned out to be true.) But mostly, it was because all my prior books were written for beginners. Both the How to Break...series and my Exploratory Testing book can be told as a complete, end-to-end story. Not so with this book. Readers might well read this book in a single sitting, but it’s meant as more of a reference for how Google actually performs the tasks, both small ones and big ones, that make up our practice of testing. I expect people who have tested software in a corporate environment will get more out of it than beginners because they will have a basis for comparing our Google processes to the ones they are used to. I picture experienced testers, managers, and executives picking it up, finding a topic of interest, and reading that section to see how Google performs some specific task. This is not a writing style I have often assumed!

Two heretofore unpublished co-authors have joined me in this endeavor. Both are excellent engineers and have been at Google longer than I have been. Jason Arbon’s title is a test engineer, but he’s an entrepreneur at heart and his impact on many of the ideas and tools that appear in the test engineer chapters of this book has been profound. Having our careers intersect has changed us both. Jeff Carollo is a tester turned developer and is categorically the best test developer I have ever met. Jeff is one of the few people I have seen succeed at “walk away automation”—which is test code written so well and so self contained that the author can create it and leave it to the team to run without intervention. These two are brilliant and we tried hard to make this book read with one voice.

There are any number of guest Googlers who have supplied material. Whenever the text and subject matter is the work of a single author, that person is identified in the heading that precedes his work. There are also a number of interviews with key Googlers who had profound impact on the way we do testing. It was the best way we could think of to include as many of the people who defined Google testing without having a book with 30 authors! Not all readers will be interested in all the interviews, but they are clearly marked in the text so they can be skipped or read individually. We thank all these contributors profusely and accept any blame if our ability to do justice to their work fell short in any way. The English language is a poor medium to describe sheer brilliance.

Happy reading, happy testing, and may you always find (and fix) the bug you are looking for.

James Whittaker
Jason Arbon
Jeff Carollo
Kirkland, Washington