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
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
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
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
More traffic from the Agile Testing mailing list; Grig Gheorghiu is a programmer in Los Angeles who has some thoughtful observations and questions. I’m well aware of the flame wars that are going on between the ‘automate everything’ camp and the ‘rapid testing’ camp. I was hoping you can give some practical, concrete, non-sweeping-generalization-based examples of how your testing strategy looks like for a medium to large project that needs … Read more