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Test Framing

Very Short Blog Posts (17): Regression Obsession

Regression testing is focused on the risk that something that used to work in some way no longer works that way. A lot of organizations (Agile ones in particular) seem fascinated by regression testing (or checking) above all other testing activities. It’s a good idea to check for the risk of regression, but it’s also a good idea to test for it. Moreover, it’s a good idea to make sure … Read more

I’ve Had It With Defects

The longer I stay in the testing business and reflect on the matter, the more I believe the concept of “defects” to be unclear and unhelpful. A program may have a coding error that is clearly inconsistent with the program’s specification, whereupon I might claim that I’ve found a defect. The other day, an automatic product update failed in the middle of the process, rendering the product unusable. Apparently a … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (14): “It works!”

“It works” is one of Jerry Weinberg‘s nominees for the most ambiguous sentence in the English language. To me, when people say “it works”, they really mean Some aspect of some feature or some function appeared to meet some requirement to some degree based on some theory and based on some observation that some agent made under some conditions once or maybe more. One of the most important tasks for … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (13): When Will Testing Be Done?

When a decision maker asks “When will testing be done?”, in my experience, she really means is “When will I have enough information about the state of the product and the project, such that I can decide to release or deploy the product?” There are a couple of problems with the latter question. First, as Cem Kaner puts it, “testing is an empirical, technical investigation of the product, done on … Read more

Harry Collins and The Motive for Distinctions

“Computers and their software are two things. As collections of interacting cogs they must be ‘checked’ to make sure there are no missing teeth and the wheels spin together nicely. Machines are also ‘social prostheses’, fitting into social life where a human once fitted. It is a characteristic of medical prostheses, like replacement hearts, that they do not do exactly the same job as the thing they replace; the surrounding … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (12): Scripted Testing Depends on Exploratory Testing

People commonly say that exploratory testing “is a luxury” that “we do after we’ve finished our scripted testing”. Yet there is no scripted procedure for developing a script well. To develop a script, we must explore requirements, specifications, or interfaces. This requires us to investigate the product and the information available to us; to interpret them and to seek ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency; to model the scope of the test … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (11): Passing Test Cases

Testing is not about making sure that test cases pass. It’s about using any means to find problems that harm or annoy people. Testing involves far more than checking to see that the program returns a functionally correct result from a calculation. Testing means putting something to the test, investigating and learning about it through experimentation, interaction, and challenge. Yes, tools may help in important ways, but the point is … Read more

Evaluating Testing: The Qualitative Way

Evaluating Testing: The Qualitative Way | Michael Bolton | STAREAST

For years, testers and managers alike have wrestled with the problem of evaluating software products and testing efforts, often using approaches derived from manufacturing, construction, and physical sciences. These approaches have been only partially successful because software products aren’t physical products. Rather, software is part of a complex web of relationships among programs, computing equipment, networks, and, most importantly, people.

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Counting the Wagons

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

Can You Hear The Alarm Bells?

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