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
In the last post, my LinkedIn correspondent provided a couple of reasons why she liked writing test cases, and why she thought it necessary to write them down in the early stages of the project. Then she gave a third reason: When I’m on a project and I am the only one who knows how to test something, then I can’t move on to something new. I’d still be testing … Read more
Over the years, LinkedIn seems to have replaced comp.software.testing as the prime repository for wooly thinking and poorly conceived questions about testing. Recently I was involved in a conversation with someone who, at least, seemed to be more articulate than most of the people on LinkedIn. Alas, I’ve since lost the thread, and after some searching I’ve been unable to find it. No matter: the points of the discussion are, … Read more
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
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
In this series of blog posts, I’ve been talking about project estimation. But I’m a tester, and if you’re reading this blog, presumably you’re a tester too, or at least you’re interested in testing. So, all this has might have been interesting for project estimation in general, but what are the implications for test project estimation? Let’s start with the tester’s approach: question the question. Is there ever such a … Read more
Over the last few posts, exploratory automation has suggested some interesting things about project dynamics and estimation. What might we learn from these little mathematical experiments? The first thing we need to do is to emphasize the fact that we’re playing with numbers here. This exercise can’t offer any real construct validity, since an arbitrary chunk of time combined with a roll of the dice doesn’t match software development in … Read more
Last time out, we determined that mucking with the estimate to account for variance and surprises in projects is in several ways wanting. This time, we’ll make some choices about the tasks and the projects, and see where those choices might take us. Leave Problem Tasks Incomplete; Accept Missing Features There are a couple of variations on this strategy. The first is to Blow The Whistle At 100. That is, … Read more
In the last post, I talked about the asymmetry of unexpected events and the attendant problems with estimation. Today we’re going to look at some possible workarounds for the problems. Testers often start by questioning the validity of models, so let’s start there. The linear model that I’ve proposed doesn’t match reality in several ways, and so far I haven’t been very explicit about them. Here are just a few … Read more
There has been a flurry of discussion about estimation on the net in the last few months. All this reminded me to post the results of some number-crunching experiments that I started to do back in November 2009, based on a thought experiment by James Bach. That work coincided with the writing of Swan Song, a Better Software column in which I discussed The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. … Read more