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
Here’s an easy-to-remember little substitution that you can perform when someone suggests “automating the testing”: “Automate the evaluation and learning and exploration and experimentation and modeling and studying of the specs and observation of the product and inference-drawing and questioning and risk assessment and prioritization and coverage analysis and pattern recognition and decision making and design of the test lab and preparation of the test lab and sensemaking and test … Read more
(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
A junior tester relates some of the issues she’s encountering in describing her work. To the people who thinks she “just breaks stuff all day”, here’s what I might reply: It’s not that I don’t just break stuff; I don’t break stuff at all. The stuff that I’ve given to test is what it is; if it’s broken, it was broken when I got it. If I break anything, consider … Read more
This article was originally published in the February 2015 edition of Testing Trapeze, an excellent online testing magazine produced by our testing friends in New Zealand. There are small edits here from the version I submitted. Once upon a time, before I was a tester, I worked in theatre. Throughout my career, I took on many roles—but maybe not in the way you’d immediately expect. In my early days, I … Read more
This blog post was co-authored by James Bach and me. In the unlikely event that you don’t already read James’ blog, I recommend you go there now. The summary is that we are beginning the process of deprecating the term “exploratory testing”, and replacing it with, simply, “testing”. We’re happy to receive replies either here or on James’ site.
Plenty of testers claim that they break the software. They don’t really do that, of course. Software doesn’t break; it simply does what it has been designed and coded to do, for better or for worse. Testers investigate systems, looking at what the system does; discovering and reporting on where and how the software is broken; identifying when the system will fail under load or stress. It might be a … Read more
“Program testing involves the execution of a program over sample test data followed by analysis of the output. Different kinds of test output can be generated. It may consist of final values of program output variables or of intermediate traces of selected variables. It may also consist of timing information, as in real time systems. “The use of testing requires the existence of an external mechanism which can be used … Read more
Just as no one has the right to tell you what language to speak at home, nobody outside of your project has the authority to tell you how to speak inside your project. Every project develops its own namespace, so to speak, and its own formal or informal criteria for naming things inside it. Rapid Software Testing is, among other things, a project in that sense. For years, James Bach … Read more