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Critical Thinking

On Green

A little while ago, I took a look at what happens when a check runs red. Since then, comments and conversations with colleagues emphasized this point from the post: it’s overwhelmingly common first to doubt the red result, and then to doubt the check. A red check almost provokes a kind of panic for some testers, because it takes away a green check’s comforting—even narcotic—confirmation that Everything Is Going Just … Read more

Oracles Are About Problems, Not Correctness

As James Bach and I have have been refining our ideas of testing, we’ve been refining our ideas about oracles. In a recent post, I referred to this passage: 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 … Read more

The Rapid Software Testing Namespace

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

The Pause

I would like to remind people involved in testing that—after an engaged brain—one of our most useful testing tools is… the pause. A pause is precisely the effect delivered by the application of four little words: Huh? Really? And? So? Each word prompts a pause, a little breathing space in which questions oriented towards critical thinking have time to come to mind. Wait…huh? Did I hear that properly? Does it … Read more

Severity vs. Priority

Another day has dawned on Planet Earth, so another tester has used LinkedIn to ask about the difference between severity and priority. The reason the tester is asking is, probably, that there’s a development project, and there’s probably a bug tracking system, and it probably contains fields for both severity and priority (and probably as numbers). The tester has probably been told to fill in each field as part of … Read more

Two Futures of Software Testing (STAR Tester Interview, post EuroSTAR 2009)

At the EuroSTAR 2008 conference, I gave a talk entitled, “Two Futures of Software Testing” which was rated as the highest-scoring track session at the conference. Conference attendees also chose the talk as the winning entry for the CapGemini Award for Innovation. Here I provide a number of answers to questions that people have asked since the presentation. Q: How can we predict the future of software testing?A: Well, we … Read more