A member of Linked In asks if “a test case can have multiple scenarios”. The question and the comments (now unreachable via the original link) reinforce, for me, just how unhelpful the notion of the “test case” is. Since I was a tiny kid, I’ve watched trains go by—waiting at level crossings, dashing to the window of my Grade Three classroom, or being dragged by my mother’s grandchildren to the … Read more
Many people seem certain about what happened to cause the healthcare.gov fiasco. Stories are starting to trickle out, and eventually they’ll be an ocean of them. To anyone familiar with software development, especially in large organizations, these stories include familiar elements of character and plot. From those, it’s easy to extrapolate and fill in the details based on imagination and experience. We all know what happened. Well, we don’t. In … Read more
Imagine a software project. Imagine the things that you want to accomplish, the problems you might encounter, the workarounds you could apply, the accidents (both happy and sad) that might happen, the missteps you may take, the steps you can take to prevent them; all of the actions you can perform to manage the project. Now, make a detailed plan that takes all of your expectations into account. The more … Read more
In response to my post from a couple of days ago, Gus kindly provides a comment, and I think a discussion of it is worth a blog post on its own. Michael, I appreciate what you are trying to say but the simile doesn’t really work 100% for me, let me try to explain. The simile has prompted you to think and to question, so in that sense, it works … Read more
Imagine that you are working for me, and that I want your help in qualifying and hiring new staff. I start by giving you my idea of how to interview a candidate for a job. “Prepare a set of questions with specific, predetermined answers. Asking questions is expensive, so make sure to come up with as few questions as you can. Ask the candidate those questions, and only those questions. … Read more
Having trouble understanding why James Bach and I think it’s important to distinguish between checking and testing? Consider this: a pile of leaves is not a tree. Leaves are important parts of trees, but there’s a lot more to a tree than just its leaves. The leaves owe their existence to being part of a larger system of the tree. Nature makes sure that leaves drop off and are replaced … Read more
It is not the job of testing to build confidence in the product. Confidence is a relationship between the product and some stakeholder. It is much more the job of testing to identify problems in the product—and in people’s perceptions of the product—that are based on or that would lead to unwarranted confidence.
Dale Emery, a colleague for whom we have great respect, submitted a comment on my last blog post, which in turn referred to Testing and Checking Refined on James Bach‘s blog. Dale says: I don’t see the link between your goals and your solution. Your solution seems to be (a) distinguishing what you call checking from what you call testing, (b) using the terms “checking” and “testing” to express the … Read more
If you’ve been in testing for long enough, you’ll eventually report or demonstrate a problem, and you’ll hear this: “No user would ever do that.” Translated into English, that means “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose, or in a way that I’ve imagined.” So here are a few ideas that might help to spur imagination. The user made a simple mistake, … Read more
In the previous post, Lynn McKee recognized that, with respect to the Comparable Product oracle heuristic, “comparable” can be have several expansive interpretations, and not just one narrow one. I’ll emphasize: “comparable product”, in the context of the FEW HICCUPPS oracle heuristics, can mean any software product, any attribute of a software product, or even attributes of non-software products that we could use as a basis for comparison. (Since “comparable … Read more