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Regression

We Have to Run the Regression Tests!

This is a lightly-edited version of a post I made on LinkedIn, which in turn was a followup to the previous post. “We have to run a full regression test suite on every build!” First: you don’t have to do anything. There is no law of nature, nor any human regulation, that says you must repeat any particular test. You choose to do things. (You don’t have to automate. You … Read more

Making Progress on Regression Testing

This post picks up on a small LinkedIn essay from a few months back. There’s a fair amount of preamble here before I talk about regression testing as such. Be careful; you might have heard about testing and checking from people who don’t talk about it the ways we do in Rapid Software Testing (RST). If you’re familiar with RST, maybe you’re fine jumping here. If you’re not so familiar … Read more

“What Tests Should I Automate?”

Instead of asking “What tests should I automate?” consider asking some more pointed questions. If you really mean “how should I think about using tools in testing?”, consider reading A Context-Driven Approach to Automation in Testing, and Testing and Checking Refined. If you’re asking about the checking of output or other facts about the state of the product, keep reading. Really good fact checking benefits from taking account of your … Read more

If We Do Sanity Testing Before Release, Do We Have To Do Regression Testing?

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

Exploratory Testing on an API? (Part 4)

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

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

Questions from Listeners (2a): Handling Regression Testing

This is a followup to an earlier post, Questions from Listeners (2): Is Unit Testing Automated? The original question was Unit testing is automated. When functional, integration, and system test cannot be automated, how to handle regression testing without exploding the manual test with each iteration? Now I’ll deal with the second part of the question. Part One: What Do We Really Mean By “Automation”? Some people believe that “automation” … Read more

Regression Testing, part I

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