The previous post in this series provided a detailed description of testing framed in terms of Intention, Discipline, Testability, and Realization: It might be tempting to unroll these frames by starting in the top right, and rearranging them in a nice, tidy, linear sequence: Although it’s not the way people usually talk about it, you could think of this as a kind of end-to-end testing. Most of the time, so … Read more
In the last post, I introduced four frames for testing, each of which might present a set of ideas for covering a product at various points through its development. On the way to a complete package, system, or service, people produce many different ideas and artifacts, each of which can be tested. Moreover, people with different interests, temperaments, and roles in the development process perceive testing in different ways. Although … Read more
Last time, we looked at what the business wants from development. What does the business want from that part of development we call testing? Sometimes people say that what the business wants from testing is confidence — reassurance that everything is okay. This is understandable — confidence is a good feeling for designers, developers, managers, and the rest of the business. Confidence and reassurance are not the business’s goal, though; … Read more
In the previous installment, we looked at what the business wants: a product of high value, and one for which costs of development and will be low. This time we’ll look from a slightly different angle: how does the business get what it wants? There is a kind of universal development cycle. No matter what your development model might be, it probably looks something like this: Since it’s a cycle, … Read more
In the first installment of this series, I introduced two key things that the business wants from development: a product of high value and low cost. In order for the business to get a high-value product, we must envision success so we can set about building it. And yet… there’s risk. It’s easy to assume that we’ve built a high-value product, and that cost to the business is low and … Read more
Conversations about testing in all kinds of places have been going pear-shaped for a long time. As Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out, the word “testing” is overloaded, lumping a variety of ideas and activities together. The word “testing” gets applied to different actitivities, performed by different people, working in different contexts, performing different tasks with different priorities, at different moments in the development process. No wonder that people … Read more
Every day, in some discussion about testing, someone talks about the need for “balance between automated testing and manual testing”. This seems to me to be a supremely unhelpful way to think about testing work. First, and once again, testing is neither manual nor automated. No one in any other cogntive, intellectual, investigative domain talks about their work that way; and no one in any such domain allows other people … Read more
This is a lightly-edited version of a post I made on LinkedIn, which in turn was a followup to the previous post. “We have to run a full regression test suite on every build!” First: you don’t have to do anything. There is no law of nature, nor any human regulation, that says you must repeat any particular test. You choose to do things. (You don’t have to automate. You … Read more
This post picks up on a small LinkedIn essay from a few months back. There’s a fair amount of preamble here before I talk about regression testing as such. Be careful; you might have heard about testing and checking from people who don’t talk about it the ways we do in Rapid Software Testing (RST). If you’re familiar with RST, maybe you’re fine jumping here. If you’re not so familiar … Read more
This is a lightly-edited excerpt from a longer blog post that you’ll find here. I recommend you read it too, but if you’re short on time, here’s the core of it. If you care about understanding the status of your product, you’ll probably care about testing it. You’ll want testing to find out if the product you’ve got is the product you want. If you care about that, you need … Read more