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Testability

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

Four (and More) Questions for Testers to Ask

Testers investigate problems and risk. Other people manage the project, design the product, and write the code. As testers, we participate in that process, but in a special way and from a special perspective: it’s our primary job to anticipate, seek, and discover problems. We testers don’t prevent problems in the product; we don’t design, build, fix, or manage the product. We’re evaluating things that other people are bringing to … Read more

(At Least) Four Things for Testers To Do in Planning Meetings

There’s much talk these days of DevOps, and Agile development, and “shift left”. Apparently, in these process models, it’s a revelation that testers can do more than test a built product, and that testers can and should be involved at every step of development. In Rapid Software Testing, that’s not exactly news. From the beginning, we’ve rejected the idea that the product has to be complete, or has to pass … Read more

A Context-Driven Approach to Automation in Testing

(We interrupt the previously-scheduled—and long—series on oracles for a public service announcement.) Over the last year James Bach and I have been refining our ideas about the relationships between testing and tools in Rapid Software Testing. The result is this paper. It’s not a short piece, because it’s not a light subject. Here’s the abstract: There are many wonderful ways tools can be used to help software testing. Yet, all … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (20): More About Testability

A few weeks ago, I posted a Very Short Blog Post on the bare-bones basics of testability. Today, I saw a very good post from Adam Knight talking about telling the testability story. Adam focused, as I did, on intrinsic testability—things in the product itself that it more testable. But testability isn’t just a product attribute. In Heuristics of Testability (material we developed in a session of Rapid Software Testing … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (18): Ask for Testability

Whether you’re working in an Agile environment or not, one of the tester’s most important tasks is to ask and advocate for things that make a product more testable. Where to start? Think about visibility—in its simplest form, log files—and controllability in the form of scriptable application programming interfaces (APIs). Logs aren’t just for troubleshooting. Comprehensive log files can help to identify the data that was processed and the functions … Read more

Testability

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