Q&A about software testing

If you want to skip the preamble and get to the point, just page down to the end of this post.

The professional software testing community has a good support network of web sites dedicated (or partially dedicated) to answering questions about testing. Some of my favorites are:

• MSDN Testing Forums 
• SQA Forums
• Software Testing Club
• Test Republic

(apologies if I didn’t include your favorite site – a comprehensive list wasn’t the point)

But as you may know, I’m a huge – no, gigantic fan of the Stack Overflow model of q&a services. The model for reputation and badges allows the reader to find the best (as voted by peer-reviews) answer quickly and encourages participation by both askers and answerers of questions.

About a year ago, when Stack Exchange (the generic engine behind Stack Overflow) went into beta, Justin Hunter kicked off a testing site based on the engine (http://testing.stackexchange.com). The site has had some traffic, but let’s face it – it doesn’t have the daily traffic of any of the four sites above (yet). If you haven’t been to http://testing.stackexchange.com yet, go ahead and ask (or answer) some questions,or vote on answers or questions you like.

Stack Exchange recently changed their model (in a good way), and have a staged process for developing sites. There’s a testing / quality assurance (people still don’t get the difference, but bear with me) site in proposal right now. The plan is, that once the site gets from proposal to beta, that we’ll use the great questions on testing.stackexchange.com to seed the new site.

I know what you’re thinking – why do we need another q&a site. For me, I believe in the Stack Exchange model, and think it would be a wonderful addition to the testing community.

If you’re with me, and want to support a Stack Exchange site on software testing, please go to the proposal and pledge your support.

We need a lot more people to commit to help make the site successful, but I know you can help..