Book Review How To Test a Time Machine by Noemí Ferrera

Here’s a short story on how I forgot the title and author of one of my favorite recent testing books, How to Test a Time Machine, and how I found it. And most importantly, my review of it.

The story of my blanked-out brain

Looking at my favorite Slack workspace this morning, I saw a friend had asked for any blogs/books resources on test automation by non-men. She already had Angie Jones, Dorothy Graham and Judy Mosley’s work noted. I instantly thought of one of my favorite books that includes a huge amount of great information on all aspects of test automation – but my brain blanked out. I couldn’t think of any part of the title, or the name of the author. I was sure I had written a review, but, my blog did not include the review I was thinking of. Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s just that at the moment I’m rather stressed by the state of our nation and by a couple of sick donkeys.

Fortunately, I was pretty sure I have a print copy of the book. Now the challenge was to find it in my vast and disorganized collection of books. It’s a recent book, where did I put those – aha, on the latest little cabinet I’d added to my office. Hooray! It’s How to Test a Time Machine: A practical guide to test architecture and automation, by Noemí Ferrera!

Again, I was sure I had written a review… maybe on Amazon? Yes! There it was! And there it still is. So that I can find my own book review again, and not blank out the title and author of one of my favorite testing books, I am going to repeat that review here, with some modifications, because I really want people to read this book!

My brief review of How to Test a Time Machine

What I love most about this book is that Noemí makes it clear that testing is an activity for anyone and everyone on a software delivery team. This is an incredibly comprehensive and modern guide to testing that should be on every software practitioner’s desk (or device, if you get the ebook). You’ll be using it for so many things.

The book includes many visuals that promote quick understanding of the concepts and techniques. There’s so much example code – and a GitHub repo to download it all. I’m especially impressed with the chapter on AI and machine learning. The book covers both using GenAI and LLM tools to help with testing, and testing AI apps.

Whatever you need to learn next to help your team build quality in – it’s likely to be in this book. If your team isn’t doing continuous integration yet – IMO a must-have for any team to succeed – this book shows you how. Need a deployment pipeline or a monitoring dashboard? Get started with the information here.

If the detailed examples and explanations here aren’t enough, each chapter ends with an extensive list of further resources. I’m blown away by the breadth and depth of Noemí’s knowledge and experience. And so happy she has shared it with us! You will learn lots from this book, whatever your experience level.

Other recommendations?

Please add your own favorite automated testing resources created by non-men in the comments! I’m sure I can think of others but at the moment, my brain is still too preoccupied by stressful things.

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