Michael Bolton

Recently I went to parent-teacher night at my 10-year-old stepson’s school. Above the door to his classroom is a list of heuristics for solving problems that I think is just dandy for testers. They’re not called heuristics there, but that’s what they are. Use logical reasoning Work backwards Make a picture or diagram Use or look for a pattern Make it simpler Guess and check Use or make a table … Read more

If you’re not already member of the Software Testing group on Yahoo, I’d recommend joining it; it’s where some of my favourite context-driven testers hang out. Better yet, join the group and contribute. The frequency of postings is relatively low, but the level of discourse is quite high. Today–November 5, 2006–there’s a wonderful thing: an experience report from Pradeep Soundararajan, a tester in India that James Bach has been coaching … Read more

I’ve been invited back to Spain by the people at inQA.labs in Barcelona, for their expo:QA conference in Madrid, November 27-30, 2006. That would be nice enough, but for me there’s a bonus: Scott Barber will be there, and he’s another person on my list of People That Testers Should Know. I first had a chance to chat with Scott at the Exploratory Testing Research Summit and the Workshop on … Read more

I have no good explanation for why, until today, I hadn’t added Mike Kelly to the list of people that I respect. Fixed. Mike is President of the Association for Software Testing, a terrific, articulate, and (*ahem!*) regular blogger. He’s one of the small-but-growing group of passionate advocates for real tester skill. He’s engaged with the creation of Open Certification for Software Testers, which even I might be able to … Read more

Continuing Grig Gheorghiu’s questions from the Agile Testing mailing list… I was just curious to know how you proceed in this case. I guess you teach your team to apply the rapid testing principles and techniques. Have you found that these principles/techniques are easily understood and applied? Are you using session-based testing? Have you still noticed regressions escaping out in the field? How many people do you usually have on … Read more

James Bach recently blogged on the notion of intution and common sense being considered harmful. You can read his post here: http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/55 Merriam-Webster Online says of “intuition”: [quote] Etymology: Middle English intuycyon, from Late Latin intuition-, intuitio act of contemplating, from Latin intuEri to look at, contemplate, from in- + tuEri to look at1 : quick and ready insight2 a : immediate apprehension or cognition b : knowledge or conviction … Read more

Ron Jeffries and I, among others, have been discussing our contrasting approaches to testing in the Agile Testing mailing list. We’ve been doing this for about five years now, and we’re not getting very far. Recently a colleague suggested that most arguments seem to be about conclusions, when in fact they’re about premises. I believe that Ron and I are working from dramatically different premises about what a test is, … Read more

Randall Schwartz provides a review of Damian Conway’s book, Perl Best Practices. If we’re lucky, you can still read the review here. I like Randall Schwartz’s stuff in general. His books on Perl are pretty readable and engaging, and they’ve helped me a ton, to the point where I can actually cobble together some useful Perl code every now and then. Damian’s book isn’t important here. I haven’t read it, … Read more

A couple of months ago, a correspondent on the Agile Testing list asked a bunch of questions, some of which I answered in an earlier blog post. Here are the answers to the other questions. 4) How do we estimate Test Efforts for agile Testing? Can we use normal estimation models? I’m going to differentiate here between agile testing and Rapid Testing–the kind of testing defined by James Bach, the … Read more