DevelopsenseLogo

Heuristics

The Best Tour

Cem Kaner recently wrote a reply to my blog post Of Testing Tours and Dashboards. One way to address the best practice issue is to go back to the metaphor and ask “What would be the best tour of London?” That question should give rise to plenty of other questions. Are you touring for your own purposes, or in support of someone else’s interests? To what degree are other people … Read more

Exploratory Testing is All Around You

I regularly converse with people who say they want to introduce exploratory testing in their organization. They say that up until now, they’ve only used a scripted approach. I reply that exploratory testing is already going on all the time at your organization.  It’s just that no one notices, perhaps because they call it “review”, or “designing scripts”, or “getting ready to test”, or “investigating a bug”, or “working around … Read more

“Flawed” Analogies

Note: This post contains plagiarism: I’ve stolen some content from an earlier blog post, and from my comments on another. I beg the forgiveness of faithful and diligent readers. Recently I’ve had to deal with some complaints from people on Twitter who seem to have misinterpreted certain analogies. Worse than that, sometimes it seems as though they don’t understand why and how we use analogies at all. Here are some … Read more

A Few Observations on Structure in Testing

On Twitter, Johan Jonasson reported today that he was about to attend a presentation called “Structured Testing vs Exploratory Testing”. This led to a few observations and comments that I’d like to collect here. Over the years, it’s been common for people in our community to mention exploratory testing, only to have someone reply, “Oh, so that’s like unstructured testing, right?” That’s a little like someone refer to a cadenza … Read more

More of What Testers Find, Part II

As a followup to “More of What Testers Find“, here are some more ideas inspired by James Bach’s blog post, What Testers Find. Today we’ll talk about risk. James noted that… Testers also find risks. We notice situations that seem likely to produce bugs. We notice behaviors of the product that look likely to go wrong in important ways, even if we haven’t yet seen that happen. Example: A web … Read more

More of What Testers Find

Damn that James Bach, for publishing his ideas before I had a chance to publish his ideas! Now I’ll have to do even more work! A couple of weeks back, James introduced a few ideas to me about things that testers find in addition to bugs.  He enumerated issues, artifacts, and curios.  The other day I was delighted to find an elaboration of these ideas (to which he added risks … Read more

You Won’t See It Until You Believe It

Not too long ago, I updated my copy of Quicken. I hesitate to say upgrade. I’ve been using Quicken for years, despite the fact that the user interface has never been wonderful and has consistently declined a little in each version. One of these days, I’ll do a 90-minute session and record some observations about the product. But for now, here’s one. The default sort order for transactions in an … Read more

Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems?

Today, someone on Twitter pointed to an interesting blog post by Alan Page of Microsoft. He says: “How do testers determine if a bug is a bug anyone would care about vs. a bug that directly impacts quality (or the customers perception of quality)? (or something in between?) Of course, testers should report anything that may annoy a user, but learning to differentiate between an ‘it could be better’ bug … Read more

One Test Per Requirement

Despite all of the dragons that Agile approaches have attacked successfully, a few still live. As crazy as it is, the idea of one test check per requirement has managed to survive in some quarters. Let’s put aside the fact that neither tests nor requirements are valid units of measurement, and focus on this: If you believe that there should be one test per requirement, then you have to assume … Read more