Michael Bolton Part of the Rapid Software Testing philosophy involves reducing waste wherever possible. For many organizations, documentation is an area where we might want to cut the clutter. It’s not that documentation is valueless, but every minute that we spend on documentation is a minute that we can’t spend on any other activity. Thus the value of the documentation has to be compared not only to its own cost, but to … Read more
Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. Lots of important work to do, and this testing challenge steals an hour from me. Matt Heuser posted it on his blog. When James Bach and I pose testing problems like this at one another, we offer the opportunity to provide a quick, practical or deep answer. Here’s mine. It ain’t quick. It’s fairly deep, but I hope it’s also reasonably practical. To start with, I think … Read more
There’s a principle in some circles that suggest that the full suite of regression tests be run after each build, or at the end of each iteration, or before each release. Typically when people talk about stuff like that, they don’t bother to specify what they mean by “full”, or “regression tests”, or even “the” (these tests, but no others?), so it’s hard to tell whether the suggestion is reasonable … Read more
I’ve realized that I’ve got a couple of problems with blogging regularly. Maybe you can help me to do something about it. The first issue is that I don’t really like to publish unpolished material in a blog. The draft mechanism handles that, to some degree. I have less of a problem with that if there’s a strong sense of mission about the material that I’m publishing–so writing magazine articles … Read more
One thing that Michael Hunter pointed out to me after the Rapid Software Testing course, which I hereby rectify: he claimed that he couldn’t find FDSFSCURA anywhere on the Net. What is FDSFSCURA and why should you care? FDSFSCURA is the mnemonic for the nine test techniques that we identify in the course. It comes from James Bach’s Heuristic Test Strategy Model. It stands for Function TestingDomain TestingStress TestingFlow TestingScenario … Read more
I first noticed Michael Hunter‘s blog a couple of years back. Michael’s blog was the most thoughtful and valuable work I had seen on testing coming from Microsoft, and it has only got better since then. I found out that Michael would be at SD West 2005. I wasn’t able to attend the conference–I was teaching in Sunnyvale that week. However, a a large number of my pals–colleagues involved with … Read more
I was back in Bengalooru (formerly Bangalore) during the week of January 30-February 3, 2007. I was doing training for a corporate client. Outside of the training (which I enjoyed and the students did too, I believe) one really positive thing happened while I was there: Pradeep Soundararajan helped me to organize a meeting of some of the people in Bengalooru who are interested in establishing a community of skilled … Read more
Erik Petersen (with whom I’ve shared one of the more memorable meals in my life) says, in the Software Testing Yahoo! group, I know when I train testers, nearly all of them complain about not enough time to test, or things being hard to test. The lack of time is typically being forced into a completely unrealistic time frame to test against. I used to have that problem. I don’t … Read more
I did a half-day tutorial–a Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing–at the STeP-IN Summit 2007, on the morning of January 18 in Bengalooru (formerly Bangalore), India. After lunch, the choice was between a presentation on test automation strategies and building test management skills. I chose to sit in on the latter. The presenter was Jaya Raghuram (Raghu) from AppLabs Technologies. Apparently his colleagues were unable to attend the scheduled talk, … Read more
Today I found a very strange remark in an article called “Best Practices for Outsourcing Software Testing and Development“. The question from the interview is “What are some of the mistakes that companies commonly make when outsourcing software testing?” Sashi Reddi, CEO of AppLabs Technology, a Philadelphia-based company that specializes in software testing and development with an emphasis on quality assurance, says: The biggest mistake is that many times companies … Read more