Book Review: Leading Testing Activities

Disclaimer: I received a free physical copy of this book from Jesper Ottosen around May 2024. I’m only reviewing it now as I didn’t have the time and energy to do anything outside of just focussing on my family. He has not seen a copy of this review beforehand.

Before getting into this review, I think it’s helpful to share a bit around my background in leading testing activities so you can see the perspective that I saw this book through.

• I have a lot of experience leading testing activities both formally and informally.
• I’ve mainly worked in Agile environments
• I’m not the target audience of this book.

Target audience

Based both on the description of this book and my experience reading it. This book is best suited for the following people:

• Those who are looking to lead testing activities in the near future
• Those who would like to lead testing activities at some point in the future
• Those who are relatively new to this. (Hard to give an actual number here but I would hazard a guess at less than 5 years of formal/informal leadership experience)

My thoughts on the book

The first thing that stood out to me was that it is fairly short - just shy of 50 pages. (I’m pretty sure the PDF version is similar in length). This isn’t necessarily reflective of how much information and insight Ottosen has to share in the book, but more of his communication style. He is very concise. Other authors could have easily given the same amount of information, but with twice as many words (and thus pages).

The book is split up into three parts, based on the title: Leading, Testing and Activities. Ottosen does a great job in managing the reader’s expectations on this.

In this book, Ottosen focusses largely on what leading activities testings looks like and a little bit on the how. He also effectively explains the context of what it’s like to work on different testing projects and his breadth of experience in the testing field really shows here.

My favourite thing about the book is that it has multiple visuals which help illustrate his point clearly. For example his visuals for: Leadership vs Management and Wardley mapping to illustrate test strategy choices. I also think this contributes to how concise the book is, as for some of the diagrams in the book, it could have taken 1-2 pages to illustrate the same point.

At the end of the book, Ottosen refers to mapping your Test Leadership Quest. I feel this would have benefitted from being expanded by going into a bit of detail as to what the following mean:

• I’m new to this
• I’m learning this
• I’m mastering this

While the words themselves are fairly simple, such phrases are very open to interpretation. I feel, also, that the target audience would have benefited from some recommended resources for people to learn some of the skills that are referred to in the book.

Overall, I think this book delivers strongly on its promise and is a great fit for people in its target audience.