“Happy path testing” isn’t really testing at all. Following the “happy path” is a demonstration. Here’s the role demonstration plays in testing: it’s nice to know that your product can achieve the happy path before you start to test it. To the degree a demonstration is a test, it’s a very shallow test. If you’re building something new and non-trivial that matters to people, or that could harm people, there’s … Read more
Note: This post refers to testing and checking in the Rapid Software Testing namespace. This post has received a few minor edits since it was first posted. For those disinclined to read Testing and Checking Refined, here are the definitions of testing and checking as defined by me and James Bach within the Rapid Software Testing namespace. Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through … Read more
As a tester, you’ve probably seen use cases, and they’ve probably informed some of the choices you make about how to test your product or service. (Maybe you’ve based test cases on use cases. I don’t find test cases a very helpful way of framing testing work, but that’s a topic for another post—or for further reading; see page 31. But I digress.) Have you ever noticed that people represented … Read more
You do not need acceptance criteria to test. Reporters do not need acceptance criteria to investigate and report stories; scientists do not need acceptance criteria to study and learn about things; and you do not need acceptance criteria to explore something, to experiment with it, to learn about it, or to provide a description of it. You could use explicit acceptance criteria as a focusing heuristic, to help direct your … 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
In response to my post from a couple of days ago, Gus kindly provides a comment, and I think a discussion of it is worth a blog post on its own. Michael, I appreciate what you are trying to say but the simile doesn’t really work 100% for me, let me try to explain. The simile has prompted you to think and to question, so in that sense, it works … Read more
Imagine that you are working for me, and that I want your help in qualifying and hiring new staff. I start by giving you my idea of how to interview a candidate for a job. “Prepare a set of questions with specific, predetermined answers. Asking questions is expensive, so make sure to come up with as few questions as you can. Ask the candidate those questions, and only those questions. … Read more
Over the last few months, and especially during some face-to-face time that we had in England recently, James Bach and I have been working to sharpen our notions of testing and checking. Although the task had been on the list for some time, we didn’t get a sense of great urgency about it until we were surprised recently to find that, at a very subtle but important level, we meant … Read more
If you’ve been in testing for long enough, you’ll eventually report or demonstrate a problem, and you’ll hear this: “No user would ever do that.” Translated into English, that means “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose, or in a way that I’ve imagined.” So here are a few ideas that might help to spur imagination. The user made a simple mistake, … Read more
I often do an exercise in the Rapid Software Testing class in which I ask people to catalog things that, for them, make testing harder or slower. Their lists fit a pattern I hear over and over from testers (you can see an example of the pattern in this recent question on Stack Exchange). Typical points include: I’m a tester working alone with several programmers (or one of a handful … Read more