In the course of trying to describe distinctions between testing and checking, a number of questions have come up: Do you want to change the language? Won’t saying “check” be confusing? Won’t this undermine our goal of industry-standard terminology? Won’t calling certain kinds of tests “checks” fly in the face of years of documentation and books? Isn’t this yet another case of you wanting testing to be done the same … Read more
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been very gratified by the response to the testing-vs.-checking distinction. Thanks to all who have grabbed on to the idea and to those who have questioned it. There’s a wonderful passage in Chapter 4 of Jerry Weinberg‘s Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing in which he breaks down the activities of a programmer engaged in testing activities—testing for discovery, discovering an unexpected … Read more
Several years ago, around the time I started teaching Rapid Software Testing, my co-author James Bach recorded a video to demonstrate rapid stress testing. In this case, the approach involved throwing an overwhelming amount of data at an application’s wizard, essentially getting the application to stress itself out. The video goes on for almost six minutes. About halfway through, James asks, “You might be asking why I don’t stop now. … Read more
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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