[Home] [Essays] [Book_Reviews] [Tools] [Links] [News] [Blog] [About]

About Us

Compendium Developments is the limited company of Alan Richardson [BSc Computing (Hons)].

Alan has been an Independent Software Testing Consultant, working primarily in the City of  London's Finance Sector. 

Alan has also worked in the Airlines, Utilities, Pharmaceutical and Telecom industries. 

Alan has a passion for testing and has dedicated his entire professional career to improving the software testing process. The challenges that this have afforded him have always been an enjoyable impetus to continue to improve his skills.

For many of the sites that he has worked on, Alan has managed test teams and written testing methodologies, processes & standards. These have always been designed to minimise extraneous documentation and to help the tester focus on testing the product and helping steer the development process whenever required. 

During his time as a test consultant Alan has built numerous testing tools to help his teams achieve productive and quality testing processes. 

These have encompassed:

1. Metric Gathering and Reporting Tools
2. Test Data Generators
3. Database Generators
4. Unit Test Harness Generation tools
5. Test Derivation Tools
6. Test Repositories
7. Problem Management Repositories
8. Status Reporting tools
9. Cross-referencing tools

The production of these have always been in addition to, and never at the expense of, constructing effective manual testing processes and procedures. Indeed some of the tools have been used to augment the commercial tools which were in place on the client site, these have included T-Plan, TestDirector, WinRunner, the Rational tool suite. 

Keeping up to date with the development of the various test tools and methods is a constant goal and Alan is a regular attendee at the BCS Sigist and Q-Bit testing tools fair (the easiest way, in the UK, of seeing many of the tools under the one roof). And yet this still isn't enough to keep up to date, Alan has to extend his researches over the internet by following up leads in the testing forums and news groups and downloading the test tools mentioned.

Alan's knowledge of programming has helped him communicate with the development teams and on every site Alan has learned, at least the basics of, the language used in the construction of the software. This helps him talk to the programmers, read and understand the documentation, understand the problems of the development environment, target the testing and help communicate effective unit testing processes.

Alan has kept up to date with Design Methodologies so that he can read and review the design documents that are produced on site. Alan is also able to help tailor these design methodologies to the demands of both the testing and the development teams. This is also the only way that he can construct effective testing processes which can address the weaknesses and augment the strengths of the design processes used.

Throughout all of this, Alan has continued to research Software Testing and improve his knowledge of Software Development in general. This has meant learning new programming languages, reading vast swathes of testing documentation, and studying related topics in psychology, systems thinking, philosophy, mathematics and formal methods.

As part of his on-going education, Alan passed the ISEB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing. Which, whatever your views on the topic of certification, or of this exam in particular, is very quickly becoming a requirement for working in the testing industry in the UK.

Alan has presented his thoughts on testing at StarEast, EuroStar and the QBit Tools Expo.

This web site represents a subset of Alan's thoughts on testing and as he continues to learn he will continue to build the site into what he hopes will be a useful source of testing information for the testing community.

Thanks for visiting.