Recently I subscribed to Software Testing and Performance magazine. I just got my first issue. There were 30 pages in the issue. Within these pages, there were 3 large ads for conferences. I started to get suspicious that this magazine might be a front for advertising. Then I found a couple articles with technical content. One of these was the ST and Pedia column.This particular column boasted that it was “translating the jargon of testing into plain English”. This month’s column focused on describing parts of the ALM. There was one main problem with this. It did not define what ALM stood for. Perhaps every tester knows this acronym by now. I think I will email the many testers I know and see if that is true.
Regardless, I did not know what ALM stood for. That made the whole column a damper. It was not quite clear how the different parts were related. Come on guys. You spell out SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). SOA is more common than ALM. Perhaps this was just an oversight. You should always write for an audience that does not know all the buzz words and acronyms. I will try to take this lesson to heart and spell out acronyms I use myself in my blog.
The whole point of receiving a print magazine like Software Testing and Performance is that I like to read it in places where I do not have a computer in front of me. Once I got to the computer, I was able to head over to Wikipedia for guidance. There I found that ALM stands for Application Lifecycle Management. But at this point, I no longer needed or wanted to read the magazine. I was in Wikipedia for my research.
I don’t know how else to combat this problem. Maybe I should write to the editor of the magazine. It did not look like the author’s of the column in question had listed their email addresses near the column. That is not too good. So far this magazine has shown me it has a lot of advertisements, and seems to be written for a specific audience which know more about testing than me.
