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In an ongoing effort to spend even more time on the Web, I am adding a Technorati profile.

I’m going to be at the STARWest conference on the evening of Wednesday, October 24 through the morning of Friday, October 26. On Thursday morning, I’ll be presenting a talk on Emotions and Test Oracles, an expansion of a lightning talk that I gave at STAR East in May. Alas, my colleague James Bach is unable to be there. His subject, “How to Fake a Test Project” will be covered … Read more

Pradeep Soundararajan is a colleague of me and of James Bach. Pradeep would say he’s a student, but in this case the student has surpassed this teacher. Pradeep writes and tests and thinks with passion. In a recent blog post, he came up with this gem: “…it is not a test that finds a bug but it is a human that finds a bug and a test plays a role … Read more

A correspondent on LinkedIn asked recently, “What are the useful metrics for software quality?” Here’s my answer (lightly edited for the blog). Update, September 20: Whoops! Thanks to Anonymous, I notice that I’ve mistranscribed the original question, which was “What are the useful metrics for code quality?” Measurement is “the empirical, objective assignment of numbers, according to a rule derived from a model or theory, to attributes of objects or … Read more

Over and over, I’ve said that testing is better on many levels when it’s investigative, rather than merely confirmatory. Today I was browsing the Web. A question that someone had asked me about SwissAir led me to Wikipedia; from there I jumped to the article on Air Canada. I’m also a fan of Stan Rogers’ music, and so I looked into the incident in which he died—a fire that started … Read more

I just recently added eight more of my Test Connection columns from Better Software magazine. Enjoy!

“No user would ever do that!”“No user would ever try that!”“No user would ever need that feature!”“That’s a cool idea, but no user would ever want it.” When developers say, “No user would ever do that,” what they really mean is “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose. In the Rapid Software Testing course, James and I have been encouraging testers to … Read more

A discussion started recently in comp.software.testing about industry best practice: When creating a complicated web based application from scratch, how many testers per developer would be considered a best practice? I have heard 1.5 testers for every developer. What are your thoughts on this? My (lightly-edited for this blog) response was… If you want to find all the bugs, 100 testers per programmer would be much better than 1.5 testers … Read more

There’s a perception (mine) that one of the biggest questions in testing is “did this test pass or fail?” However, that big question pales in significance to a much more important question, in my view: Is there a problem here? And that is what this lovely little conversation between James Bach and Mike Kelly is all about.

Again, in the unlikely event that you read my blog before you read James‘ blog. One of James’ correspondents, who sometimes goes by the name “Ben Simo”, is a very sharp fellow, as evinced by some of his posts on the software-testing mailing list. In response to our conversation about scripted test procedures, Ben asked a question that I think is important. How do we teach script writers to lock … Read more