Galvanized by Jerry Weinberg‘s workshop on experiential learning at AYE 2008, I led a tutorial at EuroSTAR 2008 that included an experiential exercise invented by my colleague James Bach. I call it The Heuristics Art Show. In small groups, people contributed, discussed, and refined headlines and descriptions of some of their heuristics, mostly to do with testing, but also to do with other aspects of life and software development. It … Read more
There’s been a lot of controversy on the schools of software testing lately, in Paul Gerrard’s blog here and here and here; in James Bach’s blog here and to some extent here, and on the software-testing mailing list. I also had a pleasant chat with Paul Gerrard at coffee break and lunch today at EuroSTAR 2008. Jonathan Kohl and I did a paper on the parallels between testing and music … Read more
In a recent blog post, Paul Gerard wants to reject the idea of schools of software testing as defined by Bret here. To me, this means that he belongs to a school of thought that suggests that there shouldn’t be schools of thought about software testing. That’s different from my school of thought, so I guess we’re in different schools of thought, at least on that issue. Paul argues that … Read more
I’m delighted to announce that my first contribution to a book debuted today. The book is called The Gift of Time. It’s a collection of essays honouring the life and work of Jerry Weinberg on the occasion of his 75th birthday and his 50th year in the computing business. The book was edited by Fiona Charles, and features contributions by many of Jerry’s colleagues and students: Robert L. Glass, James … Read more
George Dinwiddie told me a wonderful story at the AYE Conference last night. He was working with a group of developers at a company with several development groups. He coached them in implementing test-driven development and unit testing, and he emphasized to the programmers the importance of delivering well-tested code to the system testers. The results were impressive. The testers found dramatically fewer problems than usual—only one bug that was … Read more
A while back, I wrote a post on breaking code, in which I suggested that testers don’t add value to a project; they merely defend the value that’s there. This isn’t a general systems law, but any general utterance should have a couple of specific exceptions or alternative views. So, with the passage of time, here are a couple. First, a while ago, I was chatting with James Bach, and … Read more
I heard two wonderful things on the CBC today, both of which relate to this business of software development. One was on the radio, on an arts magazine called Q, hosted by the urbane Jian Ghomeshi. He was interviewing the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Junot Diaz. At one point, Diaz said something close to this: Appearances are not what matters…what’s the reality? As an artist, I’m … Read more
While reading Tim Harford’s excellent book on economics, The Logic of Life, I found this quote from Adam Smith: “The man whose whole life is spent on performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a … Read more
Shrini Kulkarni reports on a conversation that he had with Rex Black. Shrini apparently offered a definition of testing, developed by James Bach, that we use in our Rapid Software Testing course: testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it. Rex didn’t agree with this definition. “Questioning a lifeless thing like software is bizarre. I cannot question my dog,” said Rex. Despite the fact that a statement is … Read more
(This post from the past was a stepping stone on the way to our current thinking about exploratory testing which is that it’s… testing. This post remains here as a historical artifact.) One of the highlights of CAST 2008 was Cem Kaner‘s talk “The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts: What Legal Training Suggests for Testers.”A big part of the talk was the contrast between exploratory and scripted … Read more