Michael Bolton It’s a busy season in Europe for Rapid Testing this spring. I’m going to be at the Norwegian Computer Society’s FreeTest, a conference on free testing tools in Trondheim, Norway, where I’ll be giving a keynote talk on testing vs. checking on March 26. That’s preceded by a three-day public session of Rapid Software Testing, from March 23-25. Register here. After that I’m off to Germany for a three-day public … Read more
Dave Nicollette responds to my post on the Ellis Island bug. I appreciate his continuing the conversation that started in the comments to my post. Dave says, “In describing a ‘new’ category of software defect he calls Ellis Island bugs…”. I want to make it clear: there is nothing new about Ellis Island bugs, except the name. They’ve been with us forever, since before there were computers, even. He goes … Read more
A couple of years ago, I developed a version of a well-known reasoning exercise. It’s a simple exercise, and I implemented it as a really simple computer program. I described it to James Bach, and suggested that we put it in our Rapid Software Testing class. James was skeptical. He didn’t figure from my description that the exercise would be interesting enough. I put in a couple of little traps, … Read more
Rikard Edgren, Henrik Emilsson and Martin Jansson collaborate on blog called thoughts from the test eye. In a satirical post from this past summer called “Scripted vs Exploratory Testing from a Managerial Perspective“, Martin proposes that “From a managerial perspective without knowing too much about testing, your sole experience comes from the scripted test environment…” But I think that from a managerial perspective, there is another place you could look … Read more
In this blog post, my colleague James Bach talks about logging and its importance in support of exploratory testing. Logging takes care of one part of the accountability angle, and in an approach like session-based test management (developed by James and his brother Jon), the test notes and the debrief take care of another part of it. Logging records what happened from the perspective of the test system. Good logging … Read more
In our Rapid Testing class, James Bach and I like to talk about an underappreciated tester resource: disposable time. Disposable time is the time that you can afford to waste without getting into trouble. Now, we want to be careful about what we mean by “waste”, here. It’s not that you want to waste the time. You probably want to spend it wisely. It’s just that you won’t suffer harm … Read more
Over the last several months, B.J. Rollison has been delivering presentations and writing articles and blog posts in which he cites a paper Defect Detection Efficiency: Test Case Based vs. Exploratory Testing [DDE2007], by Juha Itkonen, Mika V. Mäntylä and Casper Lassenius (First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp. 61-70; the paper can be found here). I appreciate the authors’ intentions in examining the efficiency of exploratory … Read more
Excellent testers recognize that excellent testing is not merely a process of confirmation, verification, and validation. Excellent testing is a process of exploration,discovery, investigation, and learning. A correspondent that I consider to be an excellent tester (let’s call him Al) works in an environment where he is obliged by his managers to execute overly structured, highly confirmatory scripted tests. Al wrote to me recently, saying that he now realizes why … Read more
A little while ago, I mentioned that I’d be writing more about session-based test management (SBTM). For me, one thing that’s great about having a community of students and colleagues is that they can save me lots of time and work. Selena Delesie took the Rapid Software Testing course from me a few years back (that is, she was a student). Since then, she has taken Rapid Testing and its … Read more
In a Webinar that he did for uTest on December 10, 2009, James Whittaker mused aloud about what a great idea it would be to structure exploratory testing and capture ideas about it in a repository for sharing with others. It seems to me that one ideal version of that would take the form of a bibliography in a book about exploratory testing, but apparently that’s not available. Yet I … Read more