In the first installment of this series, I introduced two key things that the business wants from development: a product of high value and low cost. In order for the business to get a high-value product, we must envision success so we can set about building it. And yet… there’s risk. It’s easy to assume that we’ve built a high-value product, and that cost to the business is low and … Read more
Conversations about testing in all kinds of places have been going pear-shaped for a long time. As Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out, the word “testing” is overloaded, lumping a variety of ideas and activities together. The word “testing” gets applied to different actitivities, performed by different people, working in different contexts, performing different tasks with different priorities, at different moments in the development process. No wonder that people … Read more
The saga continues. As of this writing, OpenAI has noted the problem with David Mayer, putting it down to “a technical glitch“. As of this writing (around 2:00pm, Eastern Time, 2024-12-03), exactly the same issue persists with the name “Brian Hood”. (Here’s a link: https://chatgpt.com/share/674f5626-feb0-8009-8d82-c773b83416ae) But maybe there’s a hint as to why. A little more persuasion provides this: (and here’s a link: https://chatgpt.com/share/674f6095-f04c-8009-bdf3-daa747fec30c) ChatGPT’s guardrails are made of silly … Read more
Since June 2023, James Bach and I have been collecting a set of “syndromes” associated with certain forms of AI — chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs). The most prominent of these, at this writing is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Today we added a new syndrome: Voldemort Syndrome. Today LinkedIn (and much of the rest of the internet) lit up over the “The Man Who Shall … Read more
Today I visited Facebook to post a notice of my upcoming trip to New Zealand. There will be three stops on the tour: Auckland (for Testers and Automation, Avoiding the Traps, February 17-19), Wellington (Testers and Automation, Avoiding the Traps, February 24-26), and Christchurch (Rapid Software Testing Explored, March 10-12). Facebook’s AI Layer (I’ll just call that FAIL) offered to turn it into an event. I accepted the offer, and … Read more
Why do we refer to the real requirements for a product as ‘non-functional’ requirements? Here’s a short video in which I talk about that. https://rapid-software-testing.com/ Subscribe: @rapid_software_testing
At the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference in October 2024, I gave a keynote presentation titled “What Are We Thinking in the Age of AI?“ There’s a lot to think about, and for testers, there’s a lot to do. For one, we need to understand the basis for the “AI” claim. Any kind of software can be marketed as “AI”, since it’s doing something that (presumably) a human could do, … Read more
Every day, in some discussion about testing, someone talks about the need for “balance between automated testing and manual testing”. This seems to me to be a supremely unhelpful way to think about testing work. First, and once again, testing is neither manual nor automated. No one in any other cogntive, intellectual, investigative domain talks about their work that way; and no one in any such domain allows other people … Read more
Please remember: there’s a big difference between quality and testing; and so there’s a big difference between a quality strategy and a testing strategy. Understand the Nature of Quality The essence of quality is value to people. A quality strategy is a set of guiding ideas for building a product or service, in order to achieve the goal(s) of providing value to people. To develop a successful product, the people … Read more
(Yet another post that started on LinkedIn…) There’s lots of advice out there on how to use Large Language Models to generate test ideas, test data, or test cases. Everything I’ve done and seen myself suggests that the test ideas from LLMs are pretty generic, banal, and uninspired. Considering how LLMs work, this is unsurprising. The majority of LLMs are trained on testing material from the Web, where the overwhelming … Read more