Every day, in some discussion about testing, someone talks about the need for “balance between automated testing and manual testing”. This seems to me to be a supremely unhelpful way to think about testing work. First, and once again, testing is neither manual nor automated. No one in any other cogntive, intellectual, investigative domain talks about their work that way; and no one in any such domain allows other people … Read more
There is a testing techique that I often apply. I have recently decided to name it the First Hurdle Heuristic. The basic idea: get the product out of the starter’s blocks, and see how it performs given a relatively easy challenge. This heuristic can useful when you want to identify problems and risks immediately, or to determine whether a product might not be ready for use or for deeper testing. … Read more
This post started as a LinkedIn post, which got started as a comment replying to this poll: It’s depressing to see ideas about testing and risk reduced to dopey formulas that are great for softball “certification” exam questions, but terribly limited for investigating and revealing product and business risk. Here’s how we describe “boundary” in Rapid Software Testing: A means by which something is classified or filtered This means that … Read more
A while back I wrote a post on coverage. In fact, I’ve written a few posts about coverage, but I’m talking about this one. A question came up recently on LinkedIn that helped me to realize I had left out something important. In that post, referring to coverage as “the proportion of the product that has been tested”, I said A software product is not a static, tangible thing; it’s a … Read more
Klára Jánová is a dedicated tester who studies and practices and advocates Rapid Software Testing. Recently, on LinkedIn, she said: I might EXPECT something to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I WANT IT/DESIRE for IT to happen. I even may want it to happen, but it not happening doesn’t have to automatically mean that there’s a problem. The point of this post: no more “expected results” in the … Read more
One model for a software development project is the assembly line on the factory floor, where we’re making a buhzillion copies of the same thing. And it’s a lousy model. Software is developed in an architectural studio with people in it. There are drafting tables, drawing instruments, good lighting, pens and pencils and paper. And erasers, and garbage cans that get full of coffee cups and crumpled drawings. Good ideas … Read more
In testing, what does “100% coverage” mean? 100% of what, specifically? Some people might say that “100% coverage” could refer to lines of code, or branches within the code, or the conditions associated with the branches. That’s fine, but saying “100% of the lines (or branches, or conditions) in the program were executed” doesn’t tell us anything about whether those lines were good or bad, useful or useless. “100% code … Read more
As James Bach and I have have been refining our ideas of testing, we’ve been refining our ideas about oracles. In a recent post, I referred to this passage: Program testing involves the execution of a program over sample test data followed by analysis of the output. Different kinds of test output can be generated. It may consist of final values of program output variables or of intermediate traces of … Read more
Sometimes testers say to me “My development team (or the support people, or the managers) keeping saying that any bugs in the product are the testers’ fault. ‘It’s obvious that any bug in the product is the tester’s responsibility,’ they say, ‘since the tester had the product last.’ How do I answer them?” Well, you could say that the product’s problems are the responsibility of the tester because the tester … Read more
Every now and again, someone makes some statement about testing that I find highly questionable or indefensible, whereupon I might ask them what testing means to them. All too often, they’re at a loss to reply because they haven’t really thought deeply about the matter; or because they haven’t internalized what they’ve thought about; or because they’re unwilling to commit to any statement about testing. And then they say something … Read more