Part of the joy of producing this blog is in seeing what happens when other people pick up the ideas and run with them. That happened when I posted a scenario on management mistakes a few weeks ago, and Markus Gärtner responded with far more energy and thought than I would have expected. Thanks, Markus. Last week I posted a transcript of a transpection session between me and James Bach. … Read more
In response to my post, Testers: Get Out of the Quality Assurance Business, my colleague Adam White writes, I want ask for your experience when you’ve your first 3 points for managers: Provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions, and then let them make the decisions. Remain fully aware that they’re making business decisions, not just technical ones. Know that the product doesn’t necessarily have to … Read more
Here’s Part 2 of my notes on the CodingQA podcast, in which Matthew Osborn and Federico Silva Armas chat with James Bach about the exploratory testing and session-based test management. Skills of Exploratory Testing If you want to develop a list of testing skills, you might find it helpful to start with the Exploratory Skills and Dynamics sheet, by James Bach, Jon Bach, and Michael Bolton. One of the core … Read more
I was interviewed on April 19, 2010 by Gil Broza, an expert Agile coach who is a colleague and friend here in Toronto. Gil’s request for an interview reminded me of an experience I had a few beforehand. I received an email from a couple of researchers in Sweden who are studying exploratory testing. I was honoured to be asked for my point of view on the subject. However, I … Read more
In the interview with the Coding QA guys that was the subject of my last post, James Bach refers exploratory testing as parallel learning test design, test execution and learning, and said that exploratory approaches are epitomized by loops. Where do loops happen in exploratory testing? In fact, exploratory testing includes both looping and branching. When we’re testing in an exploratory way, we may branch away from the current path … Read more
Several months back, James Bach did an interview with the CodingQA guys, Matthew Osborn and Federico Silva Armas. In the interview, James talks about the skills of exploratory testing, sex education (now do I have your attention?) and how to use session-based test management with minimal overhead and maximum credibility. I’m surprised at how few people have heard about the podcast, so I’m drawing attention to it here. It runs … Read more
In this blog post, my colleague James Bach talks about logging and its importance in support of exploratory testing. Logging takes care of one part of the accountability angle, and in an approach like session-based test management (developed by James and his brother Jon), the test notes and the debrief take care of another part of it. Logging records what happened from the perspective of the test system. Good logging … Read more
Over the last several months, B.J. Rollison has been delivering presentations and writing articles and blog posts in which he cites a paper Defect Detection Efficiency: Test Case Based vs. Exploratory Testing [DDE2007], by Juha Itkonen, Mika V. Mäntylä and Casper Lassenius (First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pp. 61-70; the paper can be found here). I appreciate the authors’ intentions in examining the efficiency of exploratory … Read more
Excellent testers recognize that excellent testing is not merely a process of confirmation, verification, and validation. Excellent testing is a process of exploration,discovery, investigation, and learning. A correspondent that I consider to be an excellent tester (let’s call him Al) works in an environment where he is obliged by his managers to execute overly structured, highly confirmatory scripted tests. Al wrote to me recently, saying that he now realizes why … Read more
A little while ago, I mentioned that I’d be writing more about session-based test management (SBTM). For me, one thing that’s great about having a community of students and colleagues is that they can save me lots of time and work. Selena Delesie took the Rapid Software Testing course from me a few years back (that is, she was a student). Since then, she has taken Rapid Testing and its … Read more