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
(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
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
I hear a lot from testers who discover problems late in development, and who get grief for bringing them up. On one level, the complaints are baseless, like holding an investigate journalist responsible for a corrupt government. On the other hand, there’s a way for testers to anticipate bad news and reduce the surprises. Try producing a product coverage outline and a risk list. A product coverage outline is an … Read more
In response to my recent blog post, 100% Coverage is Possible, reader Hema Khurana asked: “Also some measure is required otherwise we wouldn’t know about the depth of coverage. Any straight measures available?” I replied, “I don’t know what you mean by a ‘straight’ measure. Can you explain what you mean by that?” Hema responded: “I meant a metric some X/Y.” In all honesty, it’s sometimes hard to remain patient … Read more
This article was originally published in the February 2015 edition of Testing Trapeze, an excellent online testing magazine produced by our testing friends in New Zealand. There are small edits here from the version I submitted. Once upon a time, before I was a tester, I worked in theatre. Throughout my career, I took on many roles—but maybe not in the way you’d immediately expect. In my early days, I … Read more