Michael Bolton The longer I stay in the testing business and reflect on the matter, the more I believe the concept of “defects” to be unclear and unhelpful. A program may have a coding error that is clearly inconsistent with the program’s specification, whereupon I might claim that I’ve found a defect. The other day, an automatic product update failed in the middle of the process, rendering the product unusable. Apparently a … Read more
“Help Wanted. Established scientific research lab seeks Intermediate Level Manual Scientist. Role is intended to complement our team of Automated and Semi-Automated Scientists. The successful candidate will perform research and scientific experiments without any use of tools (including computer hardware or software). Requires good communication skills and knowledge of the Hypothesis Development Life Cycle. Bachelor’s degree or five years of experience in manual science preferred.” Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? It … Read more
“It works” is one of Jerry Weinberg‘s nominees for the most ambiguous sentence in the English language. To me, when people say “it works”, they really mean Some aspect of some feature or some function appeared to meet some requirement to some degree based on some theory and based on some observation that some agent made under some conditions once or maybe more. One of the most important tasks for … Read more
When a decision maker asks “When will testing be done?”, in my experience, she really means is “When will I have enough information about the state of the product and the project, such that I can decide to release or deploy the product?” There are a couple of problems with the latter question. First, as Cem Kaner puts it, “testing is an empirical, technical investigation of the product, done on … Read more
“Computers and their software are two things. As collections of interacting cogs they must be ‘checked’ to make sure there are no missing teeth and the wheels spin together nicely. Machines are also ‘social prostheses’, fitting into social life where a human once fitted. It is a characteristic of medical prostheses, like replacement hearts, that they do not do exactly the same job as the thing they replace; the surrounding … Read more
People commonly say that exploratory testing “is a luxury” that “we do after we’ve finished our scripted testing”. Yet there is no scripted procedure for developing a script well. To develop a script, we must explore requirements, specifications, or interfaces. This requires us to investigate the product and the information available to us; to interpret them and to seek ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency; to model the scope of the test … Read more
Apropos of my recent post responding to the sentiment “We have to automate”, I got a splendid example of the suppressed choice again today. If you haven’t read that post, you might find it helpful to read it now to set the context for my main point here. It started when I was sitting at home this morning, using my laptop. The dialog below popped up on my screen. Clicking … Read more
A recent posting (apparently no longer available) on LinkedIn entitled “Why Is Automated Software Testing A Better Choice?”, prompted some discussion. (As usual, the question “better than what?” was begged.) Then came this comment from my friend Jon Hagar: “There are … environments where the team must automate, e.g. a fast embedded control system where computation cycle is 10ms.” You might be inclined to agree with Jon, and I might … Read more
Testing is not about making sure that test cases pass. It’s about using any means to find problems that harm or annoy people. Testing involves far more than checking to see that the program returns a functionally correct result from a calculation. Testing means putting something to the test, investigating and learning about it through experimentation, interaction, and challenge. Yes, tools may help in important ways, but the point is … Read more
I would like to remind people involved in testing that—after an engaged brain—one of our most useful testing tools is… the pause. A pause is precisely the effect delivered by the application of four little words: Huh? Really? And? So? Each word prompts a pause, a little breathing space in which questions oriented towards critical thinking have time to come to mind. Wait…huh? Did I hear that properly? Does it … Read more