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Management

Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them

In the testing business, we’ve been wrestling with the measurement problem for quite a while. I think there are two prongs to the problem. The first is the aphorism that “you can’t control what you can’t measure”. The second is the confusion between measurement (which can be either quantitative or qualitative) and metrics, which are mathematical functions of measurements, and therefore fundamentally quantitative, only quantitative. I don’t know if you … Read more

Exploratory Testing: Recording and Reporting

At the QUEST conference in Chicago, April 22 2009, I gave a presentation on recording and reporting for exploratory testers. You can find the presentation notes here. You can also read a more formal paper on the subject, prepared for the 2007 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, here. Both documents include material on notebooks and on Session-Based Test Management, and a bunch of other stuff besides.

What Should A Test Plan Contain?

In response to this posting, Clive asks, “So in your opinion what should a test plan contain?” First, Clive, thank you for asking. Let’s consider first what we might mean by “plan”. The way James Bach and I talk about planning (and the way we teach it the Rapid Software Testing course) is that a plan is the sum or intersection of strategy and logistics. Strategy is the set of … Read more

Test Project Estimation, The Rapid Way

Erik Petersen (with whom I’ve shared one of the more memorable meals in my life) says, in the Software Testing Yahoo! group, I know when I train testers, nearly all of them complain about not enough time to test, or things being hard to test. The lack of time is typically being forced into a completely unrealistic time frame to test against. I used to have that problem. I don’t … Read more