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Oracles from the Inside Out, Part 5: Oracles as References as Media

Try asking testers how they recognize problems. Many will respond that they compare the product to its specification, and when they see an inconsistency between the product and its specification, they report a bug. Others will talk about creating and running automated checks, using tools to compare output from the product to specific, pre-determined, expected results; when the product produces a result inconsistent with expectations, the check identifies a bug … Read more

Braiding The Stories (Test Reporting Part 2)

We were in the middle of a testing exercise at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference in 2005. I was assisting James Bach in a workshop that he was leading on testing. He presented the group with a mysterious application written by James Lyndsay—an early version of one of the Black Box Test Machines. “How many test cases would you need to test this application?” he asked. Just then Jerry Weinberg … Read more

Scripts or No Scripts, Managers Might Have to Manage

A fellow named Oren Reshef writes in response to my post on Worthwhile Documentation. Let me be the devil’s advocate for a post. Not having fully detailed test steps may lead to insufficient data in bug reports. Yup, that could be a risk (although having fully detailed steps in a test script might also lead to insufficient data in bug reports; and insufficient to whom, exactly?). So what do you … Read more

What Exploratory Testing Is Not (Part 5): Undocumented Testing

This week I had the great misfortune of reading yet another article which makes the false and ridiculous claim that exploratory testing is “undocumented”. After years and years of plenty of people talking about and writing about and practicing excellent documentation as part of an exploratory testing approach, it’s depressing to see that there are still people shovelling fresh manure onto a pile that should have been carted off years … Read more

Worthwhile Documentation

In the Rapid Software Testing class, we focus on ways of doing the fastest, least expensive testing that still completely fulfills the mission. That involves doing some things more quickly, and it also involves doing other things less, or less wastefully. One of the prime candidates for radical waste reduction is documentation that’s incongruent with the testing mission. Medical device projects typically present a high degree of risk. Excellent testing … Read more

Doing Development Work vs. Doing Quality Assurance

Here’s a case where a comment and question were worthy of a post of their own.  In reference to my recent post, Testers:  Get Out of the Quality Assurance Business, Selim Mia writes: Hi Michael, I have started following your blog just from past few days and I like to thank you for all of your thoughtful posts by which reflects your craftsmanship. Thank you for reading, and thank you … Read more

Automation Bias, Documentation Bias, and the Power of Humans

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

What Should A Test Plan Contain?

In response to this posting, Clive asks, “So in your opinion what should a test plan contain?” First, Clive, thank you for asking. Let’s consider first what we might mean by “plan”. The way James Bach and I talk about planning (and the way we teach it the Rapid Software Testing course) is that a plan is the sum or intersection of strategy and logistics. Strategy is the set of … Read more

The White Glove Heuristic and The "Unless…" Heuristic

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