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
As a followup to “More of What Testers Find“, here are some more ideas inspired by James Bach’s blog post, What Testers Find. Today we’ll talk about risk. James noted that… Testers also find risks. We notice situations that seem likely to produce bugs. We notice behaviors of the product that look likely to go wrong in important ways, even if we haven’t yet seen that happen. Example: A web … Read more
Damn that James Bach, for publishing his ideas before I had a chance to publish his ideas! Now I’ll have to do even more work! A couple of weeks back, James introduced a few ideas to me about things that testers find in addition to bugs. He enumerated issues, artifacts, and curios. The other day I was delighted to find an elaboration of these ideas (to which he added risks … 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
Despite all of the dragons that Agile approaches have attacked successfully, a few still live. As crazy as it is, the idea of one test check per requirement has managed to survive in some quarters. Let’s put aside the fact that neither tests nor requirements are valid units of measurement, and focus on this: If you believe that there should be one test per requirement, then you have to assume … Read more
Over the last few blog posts, some colleagues and I have been analyzing this sentence: “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” Now, in one sense, it’s unfair for me to pick on this sentence, because I’ve taken it out of context. It’s not unique, though; a quick search on Google reveals lots of similar sentences: “Agile teams work in a more collaborative and open … Read more
Last evening, after a long session of collecting and organizing a large number of contributed responses to yesterday’s testing challenge, I was going over my own perspectives on the sentence “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” James Bach appeared on Skype, and we began an impromptu transpection session. It went more or less like this: James: I saw your original challenge and a couple … Read more
This morning, I read a sentence that bugged me. “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” I’ve seen sentences of that general form plenty of times before. Whether I’ve reacted or not, they’ve always bugged me, and today I decided to probe into why. Rather than doing so on my own, I thought it would be more fun and more interesting to involve my community, … Read more
In this post, I’ll highlight a few more of the people that I met at EuroSTAR 2010. Please note that because there were so many people that I’d like to mention, there’s still more to come in subsequent posts. Also, I’ve included tons of links to these people and their work. Please use those links! Shmuel Gershon (@sgershon on Twitter) was in the Test Lab a lot, only one of … Read more
Way way back in 2003, Bret Pettichord first published a paper on schools of software testing. The paper was controversial. Some people found it helpful to identify different schools of thought, for the purpose of understanding ways in which reasonable people might disagree reasonably. Others found even the mention of disagreements within the field to be distasteful and divisive. Some people identified with particular schools. Others, sometimes indignantly, refused to … Read more