Note: This post contains plagiarism: I’ve stolen some content from an earlier blog post, and from my comments on another. I beg the forgiveness of faithful and diligent readers. Recently I’ve had to deal with some complaints from people on Twitter who seem to have misinterpreted certain analogies. Worse than that, sometimes it seems as though they don’t understand why and how we use analogies at all. Here are some … Read more
Despite all of the dragons that Agile approaches have attacked successfully, a few still live. As crazy as it is, the idea of one test check per requirement has managed to survive in some quarters. Let’s put aside the fact that neither tests nor requirements are valid units of measurement, and focus on this: If you believe that there should be one test per requirement, then you have to assume … Read more
Over the last few blog posts, some colleagues and I have been analyzing this sentence: “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” Now, in one sense, it’s unfair for me to pick on this sentence, because I’ve taken it out of context. It’s not unique, though; a quick search on Google reveals lots of similar sentences: “Agile teams work in a more collaborative and open … Read more
Last evening, after a long session of collecting and organizing a large number of contributed responses to yesterday’s testing challenge, I was going over my own perspectives on the sentence “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” James Bach appeared on Skype, and we began an impromptu transpection session. It went more or less like this: James: I saw your original challenge and a couple … Read more
This morning, I read a sentence that bugged me. “In successful agile development teams, every team member takes responsibility for quality.” I’ve seen sentences of that general form plenty of times before. Whether I’ve reacted or not, they’ve always bugged me, and today I decided to probe into why. Rather than doing so on my own, I thought it would be more fun and more interesting to involve my community, … Read more
There’s a mildly rollicking little discussion going on the in the Software Testing Club at the moment, in which Rob Lambert observes, “I’ve seen a couple of conversations recently where people are talking about red, green and yellow box testing.” Rob then asks “There’s the obvious black and white. How many more are there?” (For what it’s worth, I’ve already made some comments about a related question here.) At one … Read more
On April 19, 2010, I was interviewed by Gil Broza. In preparation for that interview, we solicited questions from the listeners, and I promised to answer them either in the interview or in my blog. Here’s the second one. 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? This question provides a great … Read more
In my December 2007 Test Connections column in Better Software, I discussed the problem of counting bugs, test cases, and other things that are mind-stuff, rather than physically constructed objects. I gave a number of examples, but I now have another compelling one. I got the same Christmas gift—Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought—from both my mother and my brother-in-law. (I guess they have me figured out.) In Chapter One, … Read more