In our coaching session (which started here), Frieda was still playing the part of a manager who was fixated on test cases—and doing it very well. She played a typical management card: “What about learning about the product? Aren’t test cases a good way to do that?” In Rapid Software Testing, we say that testing is evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes questioning, … Read more
Note: this post is long from the perspective of the kitten-like attention spans that modern social media tends to encourage. Fear not. Reading it could help you to recognize how you might save you hours, weeks, months of excess and unnecessary work, especially if you’re working as a tester or manager in a regulated environment. Testers frequently face problems associated with excessive emphasis on formal, procedurally scripted testing. Politics, bureaucracy, … Read more
In the previous post, “Frieda”, my coaching client, asked about producing test cases for auditors or regulators. In Rapid Software Testing (RST), we find it helpful to frame that in terms of formal testing. Testing is formal to the degree that it must be done in a specific way, or to verify specific facts. Formal testing typically has the goal of confirming or demonstrating something in particular about the product. There’s a continuum to … Read more
Last time out, I was responding to a coaching client, a tester who was working in an organization fixated on test cases. Here, I’ll call her Frieda. She had some more questions about how to respond to her managers. What if they want another tester to do your tests if you are not available? “‘Your tests’, or ‘your testing’?”, I asked. From what I’ve heard, your tests. I don’t agree … Read more
Recently, during a coaching session, a tester was wrestling with something that was a mystery to her. She asked: Why do some tech leaders (for example, CTOs, development managers, test managers, and test leads) jump straight to test cases when they want to provide traceability, share testing efforts with stakeholders, and share feature knowledge with testers? I’m not sure. I fear that most of the time, fixation on test cases … Read more
As a tester, I try to represent the interests of users. Saying the user, in the singular, feels like a trap to me. There are usually lots of users, and they tend to have diverse and sometimes competing interests. I’d like to represent and highlight the interests of users that might have been forgotten or overlooked. There’s another trap, though. As Cem Kaner has pointed out, it’s worth remembering that … Read more
Here is an edition of the reply I offered to a question that someone asked on Quora. Bear in mind that it might be a good idea to follow the links for context. If we do sanity testing before release, do we have to do regression testing? What if I told you Yes? What if I told you No? Some questions shouldn’t be answered. That is: some questions shouldn’t be … Read more
As promised, (at last!) here are some follow-up notes on previous installments in the series that starts here. Let’s revisit the original question: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? To review: there’s a problem with the question. Asking about “exploratory testing” is a little like asking about “vegetarian cauliflower”, “carbon-based human beings”, or “metallic copper”. Testing is fundamentally exploratory. Testing is an attempt … Read more
In the last two posts, I’ve been answering the question Do you perform any exploratory testing on an API? How do you do it? Last time I described the process of learning about factors in the project environment that affect my strategy as I go about the testing of an API. This time, I’ll go deeper, learn more, and begin to interact with the product. That learning and interaction feeds … Read more
Summary: Loops of exploration, experimentation, studying, modeling, and learning are the essence of testing, not an add-on to it. The intersection of activity and models (such as the Heuristic Test Strategy Model) help us to perform testing while continuously developing, refining, and reviewing it. Testing is much more than writing a bunch of automated checks to confirm that the product can do something; it’s an ongoing investigation in which we … Read more