There’s a flaw in the way most organizations classify the severity of a bug. Here’s an example from the Elementool Web site (as of 14 January, 2015); I’m sure you’ve seen something like it: Critical: The bug causes a failure of the complete software system, subsystem or a program within the system. High: The bug does not cause a failure, but causes the system to produce incorrect, incomplete, inconsistent results … Read more
For a long time, I’ve admired Robert (“Uncle Bob”) Martin’s persistent advocacy of craftsmanship in programming and software development. Recently on Twitter, he said . @LlewellynFalco When programmers do their jobs, testers find nothing. — Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin) December 8, 2014 One of the most important tasks in the testing role is to identify alternative interpretations of apparently clear and simple statements. Uncle Bob’s statement appears clear and simple, … 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
On July 23, 2002, Capers Jones, Chief Scientist Emeritus of a company called Software Productivity Research gave a presentation called “SOFTWARE QUALITY IN 2002: A SURVEY OF THE STATE OF THE ART”. In this presentation, he shows data on a slide titled “U.S. Averages for Software Quality”. (Source: http://bit.ly/1rj19Ol, accessed September 5, 2014) It is not clear what “defect potentials” means. A slide preceding this one says defect potentials are … Read more
On July 23, 2002, Capers Jones, Chief Scientist Emeritus of a company called Software Productivity Research, gave a presentation called “SOFTWARE QUALITY IN 2002: A SURVEY OF THE STATE OF THE ART”. In this presentation, he provided the sources for his data on the second slide: SPR clients from 1984 through 2002 • About 600 companies (150 clients in Fortune 500 set) • About 30 government/military groups • About 12,000 … Read more
I’m going to tell you a true story. Recently, in response to a few observations, I began to make a few changes in my diet and my habits. Perhaps you’ll be impressed. I cut down radically on my consumption of sugar. I cut down significantly on carbohydrates. (Very painful; I LOVE rice. I LOVE noodles.) I started drinking less alcohol. (See above.) I increased my intake of tea and water. … Read more
A construct, in science, is (informally) a pattern or a means of categorizing something you’re talking about, especially when the thing you’re talking about is abstract. Constructs are really important in both qualitative and quantitative research, because they allow us to differentiate between “one of these” and “not one of these”, which is one of the first steps in measurement and analysis. If you want to describe something or count … Read more
A member of Linked In asks if “a test case can have multiple scenarios”. The question and the comments (now unreachable via the original link) reinforce, for me, just how unhelpful the notion of the “test case” is. Since I was a tiny kid, I’ve watched trains go by—waiting at level crossings, dashing to the window of my Grade Three classroom, or being dragged by my mother’s grandchildren to the … Read more
Another day has dawned on Planet Earth, so another tester has used LinkedIn to ask about the difference between severity and priority. The reason the tester is asking is, probably, that there’s a development project, and there’s probably a bug tracking system, and it probably contains fields for both severity and priority (and probably as numbers). The tester has probably been told to fill in each field as part of … Read more
In the past, James Bach and I have defined “oracle” as “a principle or mechanism by which we recognize a problem,” and we’ve focused on principles rooted in ideas about consistency and inconsistency. At its foundation, applying an oracle and recognizing a problem always involves some principle that links an observation of a product to someone’s desires for it. That is: we observe a problem when we see some kind … Read more