A prototype of this post originally appeared on LinkedIn. Today I was using Microsoft Word, and for the first time I took a look at a feature that’s probably been there for a long while. Also today, there’s at least one more LinkedIn poll with an interview question — apparently aimed at testers — on a fairly trivial aspect of Java programming. Questions of that nature might reasonable if the … Read more
For a long time, I’ve suggested that testing should focus on product problems that pose risk to the business. That remains true, but lately I’m thinking there’s another consideration. For instance: yesterday, I accepted an invitation for an online meeting from a potential client. The invitation contained a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting. (If you know where this is going, and find it too painful, just skip to the … 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
A tester asks… How do we handle production bugs? When management asks “Did you test this?”. how do I respond? When management asks “Why didn’t you find that bug?”, the first step is to accept in your own mind responsibility for looking for bugs, but not a commitment to finding every bug. The latter is a great aspiration, but an unreasonable commitment, and management shouldn’t be holding you to it. … Read more
(This post is adapted from my recent article on LinkedIn.) Out there in the world, there is a persistent notion that “preventing problems early in the software development process will lead to higher-quality products than testing later will”. That isn’t true. It’s untrue, but not for the reason that might first occur to most people. The issue is not that addressing problems early on is a bad idea. That’s usually … Read more
My good friend Keith Klain recently posted this on LinkedIn: “Why didn’t we catch this in QA” might possibly be the most psychologically terrorizing and dysfunctional software testing culture an organization can have. I’ve seen it literally destroy good people and careers. It flies in the face of systems thinking, complexity of failure, risk management, and just about everything we know about the psychology involved in testing, but the bully … Read more
This post serves two purposes. It is yet another installation in The Series That Ate My Blog; and it’s a kind of personal exploration of work in progress on the Rapid Software Testing Guide to Test Reporting. Your feedback and questions on this post will help to inform the second project, so I welcome your comments. As a tester, your mission is to evaluate the product and report on its … Read more
Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at an an alternative to artifact-based approaches to performing and accounting for testing: an activity-based approach. Frieda, my coaching client, and I had been discussing how to manage testing without dependence on formalized, scripted, procedural test cases. Part of any approach to making work accountable is communication between a manager or test lead and the person who had done the work. In session-based test … Read more
Throughout this series, we’ve been looking at an an alternative to artifact-based approaches to testing: an activity-based approach. In the previous post, we looked at a kind of scenario testing, using a one-page sheet to guide a tester through a session of testing. The one-pager replaces explicit, formal, procedure test cases with a theme and a set of test ideas, a set of guidelines, or a checklist. The charter helps … Read more
For years at conferences and meetups and in social media, I have been hearing regularly from testers who tell me that they must “sign off” on the product or deployment before it is released to production, or to review by the client. The testers claim that, after they have performed some degree of testing work, they must “approve” or “reject” the product. Here’s a fairly typical verbatim report from one … Read more