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 first one. How to deal with un-experienced testers? is there a test approach that suits better for them? Here’s what I’d do: I’d train them. I’d pair them up with more experienced testers … Read more
The other day on Twitter, Cory Foy tweeted a challenge: “Having a QA department is a sign of incompetency in your Development department. Discuss.” Here’s what I think: I’m a tester, and it’s time for our craft to grow up. Whatever the organizational structure of our development shops, it’s time for us testers to get out of the Quality Assurance business. In the fall of 2008, I was at the … Read more
In the interview with the Coding QA guys that was the subject of my last post, James Bach refers exploratory testing as parallel learning test design, test execution and learning, and said that exploratory approaches are epitomized by loops. Where do loops happen in exploratory testing? In fact, exploratory testing includes both looping and branching. When we’re testing in an exploratory way, we may branch away from the current path … Read more
Several months back, James Bach did an interview with the CodingQA guys, Matthew Osborn and Federico Silva Armas. In the interview, James talks about the skills of exploratory testing, sex education (now do I have your attention?) and how to use session-based test management with minimal overhead and maximum credibility. I’m surprised at how few people have heard about the podcast, so I’m drawing attention to it here. It runs … Read more
Dave Nicollette responds to my post on the Ellis Island bug. I appreciate his continuing the conversation that started in the comments to my post. Dave says, “In describing a ‘new’ category of software defect he calls Ellis Island bugs…”. I want to make it clear: there is nothing new about Ellis Island bugs, except the name. They’ve been with us forever, since before there were computers, even. He goes … Read more
A couple of years ago, I developed a version of a well-known reasoning exercise. It’s a simple exercise, and I implemented it as a really simple computer program. I described it to James Bach, and suggested that we put it in our Rapid Software Testing class. James was skeptical. He didn’t figure from my description that the exercise would be interesting enough. I put in a couple of little traps, … Read more
Excellent testers recognize that excellent testing is not merely a process of confirmation, verification, and validation. Excellent testing is a process of exploration,discovery, investigation, and learning. A correspondent that I consider to be an excellent tester (let’s call him Al) works in an environment where he is obliged by his managers to execute overly structured, highly confirmatory scripted tests. Al wrote to me recently, saying that he now realizes why … Read more
And now for the immodest part of the EuroSTAR 2009 Test Lab report: I won the Best Bug award, although it’s not clear to me which bug got the nod, since I reported several fairly major problems. I tested OpenEMR. For me, one candidate for the most serious problem would have been a consistent pattern of inconsistency in input handling and error checking. I observed over a dozen instances of … Read more
One of the coolest things about EuroSTAR 2009 was the test lab set up by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack. James and Bart (who self-identified as Test Lab Rats) provided testers with the opportunity to have a go at two applications, FreeMind (an open-source mind-mapping program) and OpenEMR (an open-source product for tracking medical records). The Lab Rats did a splendid job of setting things up and providing the services … Read more
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