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Test Framing

Pass vs. Fail vs. Is There a Problem Here?

A test, for the purposes of this discussion, is at its core a process of exploration. Initially, our community described exploratory testing as “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning.” Later descriptions included “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning, with an emphasis on learning“, “a parallel process of test design, test execution, test result interpretation, and learning, with an emphasis on learning”. At the Workshop on Heuristic and Exploratory … Read more

Transpection and the Three Elements of Checking

James Bach and I have a thing that we do called “transpection“. It’s not at all new (you do it, Socrates and his interlocutors did it in Plato’s dialogs, and people did it long before that and have done it ever since) but I think James’ word for it is new. Transpection is an exploratory conversation aimed (or chartered) towards discussing and refining a particular idea. Transpection is a way … Read more

Testing vs. Checking

Post-postscript: Think of this blog post with its feet up, enjoying a relaxing retirement after a strenuous career. Please read the new version first. In the years since the original post, I’ve further refined my take on the subject of testing and checking, mostly in collaboration with my colleague James Bach. Our current thinking on the topic appears on his blog, and I provide some followup here. We’ve also benefitted … Read more

Testability

On Twitter, Kindly Reader @jrl7 (in real life, John Lambert at Microsoft) asks “Is there an example of testability that doesn’t involve improving ability to automate? (improved specs?)“. (Update, June 5 2014: For a fast and updated answer, see Heuristics of Software Testability.) Yup. If testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it, then testability is anything that makes it easier to question or evaluate that product. So … Read more

Exploratory Testing: Recording and Reporting

At the QUEST conference in Chicago, April 22 2009, I gave a presentation on recording and reporting for exploratory testers. You can find the presentation notes here. You can also read a more formal paper on the subject, prepared for the 2007 Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, here. Both documents include material on notebooks and on Session-Based Test Management, and a bunch of other stuff besides.

What Counts? Redux

In my December 2007 Test Connections column in Better Software, I discussed the problem of counting bugs, test cases, and other things that are mind-stuff, rather than physically constructed objects. I gave a number of examples, but I now have another compelling one. I got the same Christmas gift—Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought—from both my mother and my brother-in-law. (I guess they have me figured out.) In Chapter One, … Read more

Pairwise Testing

I wrote a paper on pairwise testing in 2004 (and earlier), and now, in 2007, it’s time for an update. This post is an edited version of an appendix that I’ve recently added to that paper. First, there appears to be great confusion in the world between orthogonal arrays and pairwise testing. People use the terms interchangeably, but there is a clear and significant difference. I’m fairly proud of the … Read more

Heuristics of GUI Automation Tools

A correspondent on the Agile Testing mailing list asked recently Shall automated acceptance tests use the GUI the app provides? My reply sat in my drafts folder for a while, and I just found it. Too late for the conversation, really, so I’ll post it here. My thought, as usual, is that automated acceptance tests checks should or should not use the GUI depending on the questions you want to … Read more

McLuhan Thinking for Testers

This posting is a slightly modified version of an exchange on the software testing mailing list. It also formed the basis for an Better Software column called “McLuhan for Testers“. One of the Kindly Contributors to the software-testing mailing list, José Alejandro Betancur, writes: [quote] I have been creating the Test Department at a developer company (www.intergrupo.com) for about 1 1/2 year. But I’m facing a problem right now, and … Read more

Test Project Estimation, The Rapid Way

Erik Petersen (with whom I’ve shared one of the more memorable meals in my life) says, in the Software Testing Yahoo! group, I know when I train testers, nearly all of them complain about not enough time to test, or things being hard to test. The lack of time is typically being forced into a completely unrealistic time frame to test against. I used to have that problem. I don’t … Read more