A while ago, James Bach and I did a transpection session. The object of the conversation was to think critically about the common trope that every test consists of at least an input and an expected result. We wanted to go deeper than that, and in the process we discovered a number of useful ideas. A test can be informed by an expectation, but oracles can also be developed on … Read more
Testing is about not being fooled, and being fooled often starts with fooling yourself. A while back on Twitter, I posted some of these little examples of problems in argumentation, most of which include some logical fallacy or another. It’s a fun game; add your own! I reject his argument because 73.154% of the time, he uses misleadingly precise data. I reject his argument because he’s appealing to authority, and … Read more
Recently a colleague noted that his Agile team was having trouble with the notion of done. “Sometimes it seems like the rest of the team doesn’t get it. The testers know that ‘done’ means tested. And if you ask the programmers, they’ll acknowledge that, yes, done means tested. Everyone is acting in good faith. But during the sprint planning meeting, we keep having to remind people to include time and … Read more
Cem Kaner recently wrote a reply to my blog post Of Testing Tours and Dashboards. One way to address the best practice issue is to go back to the metaphor and ask “What would be the best tour of London?” That question should give rise to plenty of other questions. Are you touring for your own purposes, or in support of someone else’s interests? To what degree are other people … Read more
A friend told me about a payment system he worked on once. In the system models (and in the source code), the person sending notification of a pending payment was the payer. The person who got that notice was called the payee. That person could designate somone else—the recipient—to pick up the money. The transfer agent would credit the account of the recipient, and debit the account of the person … Read more
Rikard Edgren is a testing philosopher in Sweden. He independently develops his own ideas on testing (an example here), collaborates with his colleagues on The Test Eye, and critiques and builds on the work of other people in the community. He offered a comment to my recent post on test framing, and the comment deserves a post on its own. He said, I don’t think explicit framing is needed very … Read more
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
Last week in the Netherlands, I presented a workshop on test framing, a skill that James Bach and I like to talk about. Test framing is the set of logical connections that structure, inform, and motivate a test. Testing is a process of composing, editing, narrating, and justifying a story with three parallel threads. There is a product element—the part of the story that describes product, how it works, how … Read more
Note: This post contains plagiarism: I’ve stolen some content from an earlier blog post, and from my comments on another. I beg the forgiveness of faithful and diligent readers. Recently I’ve had to deal with some complaints from people on Twitter who seem to have misinterpreted certain analogies. Worse than that, sometimes it seems as though they don’t understand why and how we use analogies at all. Here are some … Read more
On Twitter, Johan Jonasson reported today that he was about to attend a presentation called “Structured Testing vs Exploratory Testing”. This led to a few observations and comments that I’d like to collect here. Over the years, it’s been common for people in our community to mention exploratory testing, only to have someone reply, “Oh, so that’s like unstructured testing, right?” That’s a little like someone refer to a cadenza … Read more