Black keeps on stating, that he has a lot of practical experience. The book is supposed to help me in my daily business as a (for me) testmanager. Well, it did not.
1) I can not take him serious (watching him give a presentation is fun and interesting, though), when he proposes to manage testcases in Excel. Of course I tried that (didn't we all try that once?), in fact have seen it on several projects. It failed every single time. You need a database system for even medium sized projects. I actually found it very helpful to use a bugzilla like system to manage them.
2) He describes a bug tracking system. That might have been necessary a few years ago, but today there is Bugzilla (or Jira, or the like). They are cheap, very flexible and developed from a need. On the World Congress for Computer Quality in Munich (2005) I talked to several vendors of such testcase tracking systems. They were quite expensive and none could provide me some of the feautures possible with Bugzilla. Oh, they had all kinds of fancy wizards and automatic equivalent classes generators and the like. Too bad, that I never missed those things, might be because time is the single most contraining factor for me and my team.
So, the book gives a good theoretical overview. It is easy to read and beginners will certainly learn something from it. If you have any background book on testing and have some experience in testing, don't bother.
