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Index/Engineering & DevTools/Software Testing Unleashed
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Children's Book About Testing That Inspired a Future Tester - Kari Kakkonen

Software Testing Unleashed · 2026-07-16 · 17 min

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Topics in this episode

software qualitysoftware testing for childrentesting book for kidsdragons and defectstesting concepts for beginners

Episode notes

A testing expert explains why no book about testing for children existed yet With Kari Kakkonen I talk about what happens when you explain software testing through a fantasy story for children, where dragons are defects and knights are testers. We get into how the analogy grew into a full world covering functional, performance, usability, and security defects, each mapped to a chapter with its own kind of dragon. Kari describes how he tested the book iteratively with children, teachers, testing professionals, and non-IT readers across four rounds, and how a twelve-year-old at a book fair said she wanted testing as a profession after flipping through it. We also touch on the donation campaign that brought the book into schools across Finland and beyond, and what a possible second volume might cover, from testing techniques to automation and AI. One detail I keep coming back to: not every analogy in the book is spelled out, and the black dragon is left without explanation on purpose. "Every chapter is a different kind of a quality attribute or quite odd defect." - Kari Kakkonen Kari Kakkonen has worked in software testing for 30 years.

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