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
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
“Computers and their software are two things. As collections of interacting cogs they must be ‘checked’ to make sure there are no missing teeth and the wheels spin together nicely. Machines are also ‘social prostheses’, fitting into social life where a human once fitted. It is a characteristic of medical prostheses, like replacement hearts, that they do not do exactly the same job as the thing they replace; the surrounding … Read more
Several years ago, I worked for a few weeks as a tester on a big retail project. The project was spectacularly mismanaged, already a year behind schedule by the time I arrived. Just before I left, the oft-revised target date slipped by another three months. Three months later, the project was deployed, then pulled out of production for another six months to be fixed. Project managers and a CIO, among … Read more
In my recent blog post, Testing Problems Are Test Results, I noted a question that we might ask about people’s perceptions of testing itself: Does someone perceive testing to be difficult or time-consuming? Who? What’s the basis for that perception? What assumptions underlie it? The answer to that question may provide important clues to the way people think about testing, which in turn influences the cost and value of testing. … 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
A while ago, James Bach and I did a transpection session. The object of the conversation was to think critically about the common trope that every test consists of at least an input and an expected result. We wanted to go deeper than that, and in the process we discovered a number of useful ideas. A test can be informed by an expectation, but oracles can also be developed on … Read more
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
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