In which the conversation about heuristics and oracles continues… “So what’s the difference,” I asked my tester friend Tony, “between an oracle and a heuristic?” “Hmm. Well, I’ve read the Rapid Testing stuff, and you and James keep saying an oracle is a principle or mechanism by which we recognize a problem.“ “Yes,” I said. “That’s what we call an oracle. What’s the difference between that and a heuristic?” “An … Read more
This conversation is fictitious, but it’s also representative of several chats that I’ve had with testers over the last few weeks. Tony, a tester friend, approached me recently, and told me that he was having trouble understanding heuristics and oracles. I have a heuristic approach for solving the problem of people not understanding a word: Give ’em a definition. So, I told him: A heuristic is a fallible method for … Read more
In the last post in this series, I noted some potentially useful structual similarities between bug reports (whether oral or written) and newspaper reports. This time, I’ll delve into that a little more. To our clients, investigative problem reports are usually the most important part of the product story. The most respected newspapers don’t earn their reputations by reprinting press releases; they earn their reputations through investigative journalism. As testers … Read more
We were in the middle of a testing exercise at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference in 2005. I was assisting James Bach in a workshop that he was leading on testing. He presented the group with a mysterious application written by James Lyndsay—an early version of one of the Black Box Test Machines. “How many test cases would you need to test this application?” he asked. Just then Jerry Weinberg … Read more
This week I had the great misfortune of reading yet another article which makes the false and ridiculous claim that exploratory testing is “undocumented”. After years and years of plenty of people talking about and writing about and practicing excellent documentation as part of an exploratory testing approach, it’s depressing to see that there are still people shovelling fresh manure onto a pile that should have been carted off years … Read more
Quick tests are inexpensive tests that require little time or effort to prepare or perform. They may not even require a great deal of knowledge about the application being tested nor about its business domain, but they can help to develop new knowledge rapidly. Rather than emphasizing comprehensiveness or integrity, quick tests are designed to reveal information in a hurry at a minimal cost. A quick test can be a … Read more
People often make a distinction between “automated” and “exploratory” testing. This is like the distinction between “red” cars and “family” cars. That is, “red” (colour) and “family” (some notion of purpose) are in orthogonal categories. A car can be one colour or another irrespective of its purpose, and a car can be used for a particular purpose irrespective of its colour. Testing, whether exploratory or not, can make heavy or … Read more
Exploratory testing is not “after-everything-else-is-done” testing. Exploratory testing can (and does) take place at any stage of testing or development. Indeed, TDD (test-driven development) is a form of exploratory development. TDD happens in loops, in which the programmer develops a check, then develops the code to make the check pass (along with all of the previous checks), then fixes any problems that she has discovered, and then loops back to … Read more
Touring is one way of structuring exploratory testing, but exploratory testing is not necessarily touring, and touring is not necessarily exploratory. At one extreme, a tourist might parachute into a territory for which there is no detailed knowledge of the landscape, flora and fauna, or human culture, with the goal of identifying what’s there to be learned. Except in such cases, we wouldn’t call her a tourist; we’d call her … Read more
If you spend any time in forums in which new testers can be found, it won’t be long before someone asks “”What is the difference between smoke testing and sanity testing?” “What is the difference between smoke testing and sanity testing?” is a unicorn question. That is, it’s a question that shouldn’t be answered except perhaps by questioning the question: Why does it matter to you? Who’s asking you? What … Read more