You do not need acceptance criteria to test. Reporters do not need acceptance criteria to investigate and report stories; scientists do not need acceptance criteria to study and learn about things; and you do not need acceptance criteria to explore something, to experiment with it, to learn about it, or to provide a description of it. You could use explicit acceptance criteria as a focusing heuristic, to help direct your … Read more
Here’s a pattern I see fairly often at the end of bug reports: Expected: “Total” field should update and display correct result. Actual: “Total” field updates and displays incorrect result. Come on. When you write a report like that, can you blame people for thinking you’re a little slow? Or that you’re a bureaucrat, and that testing work is mindless paperwork and form-filling? Or perhaps that you’re being condescending? It … 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
For a long time, I’ve admired Robert (“Uncle Bob”) Martin’s persistent advocacy of craftsmanship in programming and software development. Recently on Twitter, he said . @LlewellynFalco When programmers do their jobs, testers find nothing. — Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin) December 8, 2014 One of the most important tasks in the testing role is to identify alternative interpretations of apparently clear and simple statements. Uncle Bob’s statement appears clear and simple, … Read more
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
presented by the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference
Michael Bolton hosted a live Google Hangout where he will discuss his recent Masterclass entitled:
‘How to get what you want from Testing’.
(For Testers, Developers & Managers)
In this session, Michael explained the role of skilled software testers, and why you might not want to think of testing as “quality assurance”.
“Computers and their software are two things. As collections of interacting cogs they must be ‘checked’ to make sure there are no missing teeth and the wheels spin together nicely. Machines are also ‘social prostheses’, fitting into social life where a human once fitted. It is a characteristic of medical prostheses, like replacement hearts, that they do not do exactly the same job as the thing they replace; the surrounding … Read more
Testing is not about making sure that test cases pass. It’s about using any means to find problems that harm or annoy people. Testing involves far more than checking to see that the program returns a functionally correct result from a calculation. Testing means putting something to the test, investigating and learning about it through experimentation, interaction, and challenge. Yes, tools may help in important ways, but the point is … Read more
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
A plan is not a document. A plan is a set of ideas that may be represented by a document or by other kinds of artifacts. In Rapid Testing, we emphasize preparing your mind, your skills, and your tools, and sharpening them all as you go. We don’t reject planning, but we de-emphasize it in favour of preparation. We also recommend that you keep the artifacts that represent your plans … Read more