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Permalink Reply by Matthew Heusser on February 5, 2008 at 10:32pm

Hi Shrini!

I think we use systems thinking every day - from little things like "what order should I go to these four shops to be the most efficient?" to "What test cases are the most valuable for me to execute?" to "What is the risk of my skipping X to save time?"

The books you listed are great. If the audience wants something that is more directly applicable to testing (maybe something they can expense?) I would recommend "Becoming a technical leader" by Weinberg or "Quality Software Management Volume I: A systems thinking approach."

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Permalink Reply by Michael Bolton on February 6, 2008 at 4:46am

Those who are fond of metrics should consider...

Quality Software Management, Vol. 2., “First Order Measurement” (Gerald M. Weinberg)
How to Lie with Statistics (Darrell Huff)
Freakonomics (Stephen Leavitt)
The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

These are all works that have a strong general systems flavour to their discussions of metrics.

For dessert, try

“Software Engineering Metrics: What Do They Measure and How Do We Know?” (Cem Kaner and Walter P. Bond;
http://www.kaner.com/pdfs/metrics2004.pdf)

---Michael B.

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