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Tester’s Mindset

Coding QA Podcast on Exploratory Testing

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

Return to Ellis Island

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

The Ellis Island Bug

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

Handling an Overstructured Mission

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

Best Bug… or Bugs?

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

EuroSTAR’s Test Lab: Bravo!

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

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

A Letter To The Programmer

This is a letter that I would not show to a programmer in a real-life situation. I’ve often thought of bits of it at a time, and those bits come up in conversation occasionally, but not all at once. This is based on an observation of the chat window in Skype 4.0.0.226. Dear Programmer, I discovered a bug today. I’ll tell you how I found it. It’s pretty easy to … Read more

How Can A Trainee Improve His (Her) Skills

A blogger on TestRepublic asks “How can a trainee improve his/her skill sets in testing?” This is what I do. I recommend it to all trainees (or “freshers”, as they say in India). Find something that interests you, or something that would be useful to you or to a client, or something that you must do, or a problem that you need to solve, or something that you think might … Read more