Children's Book About Testing That Inspired a Future Tester - Kari Kakkonen

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. He is the Service Owner of Customer Expertise Development at Gofore, co-author of ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook, and author of the Dragons Out books. Kari is the 2025 ICT Influencer of the Year, 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. His Dragons Out fantasy book teaches children about software testing. He has an M.Sc. from Aalto University (aalto.fi). He works mostly with agile testing, lean, test automation, DevOps, and AI. Kari was on the Executive Committee of ISTQB (istqb.org) 2015-2021. He is on the Board of Directors of TMMi (tmmi.org). He is the Treasurer of FiSTB (fistb.fi). Kari is a singer, snowboarder, kayaker, husband, and dad.

Highlights:

• Dragons as defects and knights as testers form the central analogy of the book, with every character, from villagers to lords, mapped to a role in software quality.
• The book covers quality attributes chapter by chapter, using James Bach's heuristic bug taxonomy as a structural checklist to ensure defect types are not missed.
• Four iterative feedback rounds with children, teachers, testing professionals, and non-IT adults shaped the story, each round using new readers to get unbiased reactions.
• The book was donated to roughly fifty schools in Finland, with ISTQB boards in other countries running parallel donation campaigns to local schools.
• A planned second volume would cover testing techniques, heuristics, test automation, and AI, extending beyond the quality-characteristics focus of the first book.

More Links with Insights:

• Dragons Out Books

📌 Testing is a people business, humanity as a superpower. That is my talk on October 7 at HUSTEF 2026 in Budapest: See programme and tickets