Michael Bolton This may just be my all-time favourite error message: Note that the promulgator of the message doesn’t identify itself (the caption bar is helpfully labelled “DLL”); that the program to be loaded isn’t identified; that the format isn’t identified; that what you might do to fix the problem isn’t identified… Oh, and by the way… a little detective work shows that it comes from Adobe Acrobat.
A test, for the purposes of this discussion, is at its core a process of exploration. Initially, our community described exploratory testing as “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning.” Later descriptions included “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning, with an emphasis on learning“, “a parallel process of test design, test execution, test result interpretation, and learning, with an emphasis on learning”. At the Workshop on Heuristic and Exploratory … Read more
James Bach and I have a thing that we do called “transpection“. It’s not at all new (you do it, Socrates and his interlocutors did it in Plato’s dialogs, and people did it long before that and have done it ever since) but I think James’ word for it is new. Transpection is an exploratory conversation aimed (or chartered) towards discussing and refining a particular idea. Transpection is a way … Read more
Post-postscript: Think of this blog post with its feet up, enjoying a relaxing retirement after a strenuous career. Please read the new version first. In the years since the original post, I’ve further refined my take on the subject of testing and checking, mostly in collaboration with my colleague James Bach. Our current thinking on the topic appears on his blog, and I provide some followup here. We’ve also benefitted … Read more
I just spent $3,000 to get my nose fixed, and then I found out it was my tie that was crooked. —Steve Shrott There’s a piece of software development mythodology that suggests that it’s always more expensive to fix a problem late in the development process rather than early. Usually the ratios quoted are fantastic; a hundred to one, a thousand to one, ten thousand to one. Let’s put that … Read more
Some of this posting is based on a conversation from a little while back on TestRepublic.com. If anyone has a problem with “test estimation”, here’s a thought experiment: Your manager (your client) wants to give you an assignment: to evaluate someone’s English skills, with the intention of qualifying him to work with your team. So how long would it take you to figure out whether a Spanish-speaking person spoke English … Read more
At about the 10-minute mark in this video (from 1968) Marshall McLuhan refers to an expression that he claimed was then in use at IBM: “Information overload leads to pattern recognition.” This is central to the idea of what blink testing is all about. He also describes characteristics of the scientist’s mindset vs. the artist’s mindset, which reminded me of similar patterns that we might see in programmers and testers. … Read more
In the testing business, we’ve been wrestling with the measurement problem for quite a while. I think there are two prongs to the problem. The first is the aphorism that “you can’t control what you can’t measure”. The second is the confusion between measurement (which can be either quantitative or qualitative) and metrics, which are mathematical functions of measurements, and therefore fundamentally quantitative, only quantitative. I don’t know if you … Read more
On Twitter, Kindly Reader @jrl7 (in real life, John Lambert at Microsoft) asks “Is there an example of testability that doesn’t involve improving ability to automate? (improved specs?)“. (Update, June 5 2014: For a fast and updated answer, see Heuristics of Software Testability.) Yup. If testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it, then testability is anything that makes it easier to question or evaluate that product. So … Read more
A few weeks I went down to the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to register Ariel, my daughter, as an American citizen born abroad. (She’s a potential dualie, because she was born in Canada to an American parent: me. I am a dualie, born in the U.S. to Canadian parents. Being born a dual citizen is a wonderful example of a best practice. You should follow it. But I digress.) The … Read more