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James scooped me! In the unlikely event that you read my blog before you read his, I’m proud to present this conversation (http://www.developsense.com/audio/whatdoscriptstellus.mp3) between him and me, which about the nature of scripted test procedures and some of the dangerous assumptions that people make about them. The chat is about one hour long. It’s only slightly marred by a phone line with a little echo. As James suggests, before you … Read more

This was written in reply to a suggestion on comp.software.testing that we can’t decide when we’ve done enough ad hoc or exploratory testing. The original poster asked: Can you predict how much time such testing stage will take? What are grounding your estimates on? When do you have a chance to adjust your estimates? Is not it too late? And what are you doing in case it is? How do … Read more

I revisited this passage recently. I’ve added the emphasis. [quote] I am going to describe my personal views about managing large software developments. I have had various assignments during the past nine years, mostly concerned with the development of software packages for spacecraft mission planning, commanding, and post-flight analysis. In these assignments I have experienced different degrees of success with respect to arriving at an operational state, on-time, and within … Read more

Mark Federman is the author (with Derrick deKerckhove) of McLuhan for Managers, a wonderfully accessible book on McLuhan’s principles applied to more recent ideas about technological innovation. Mark was the first person to point me to this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE), which I anticipate will shortly be all over the Web. Although I can see his comments in my aggregator, I can’t see them on his blog yet. To sum them up: the … Read more

One good reason for reading Michael Hunter’s blog: He’ll help make sure you don’t miss thing like this (http://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/TestTrimmingFable.html)–a new fairy tale from Jerry Weinberg. Kids (and their grandfathers) say the darndest things.

Hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. Lots of important work to do, and this testing challenge steals an hour from me. Matt Heuser posted it on his blog. When James Bach and I pose testing problems like this at one another, we offer the opportunity to provide a quick, practical or deep answer. Here’s mine. It ain’t quick. It’s fairly deep, but I hope it’s also reasonably practical. To start with, I think … Read more

There’s a principle in some circles that suggest that the full suite of regression tests be run after each build, or at the end of each iteration, or before each release. Typically when people talk about stuff like that, they don’t bother to specify what they mean by “full”, or “regression tests”, or even “the” (these tests, but no others?), so it’s hard to tell whether the suggestion is reasonable … Read more

I’ve realized that I’ve got a couple of problems with blogging regularly. Maybe you can help me to do something about it. The first issue is that I don’t really like to publish unpolished material in a blog. The draft mechanism handles that, to some degree. I have less of a problem with that if there’s a strong sense of mission about the material that I’m publishing–so writing magazine articles … Read more

One thing that Michael Hunter pointed out to me after the Rapid Software Testing course, which I hereby rectify: he claimed that he couldn’t find FDSFSCURA anywhere on the Net. What is FDSFSCURA and why should you care? FDSFSCURA is the mnemonic for the nine test techniques that we identify in the course. It comes from James Bach’s Heuristic Test Strategy Model. It stands for Function TestingDomain TestingStress TestingFlow TestingScenario … Read more

I first noticed Michael Hunter‘s blog a couple of years back. Michael’s blog was the most thoughtful and valuable work I had seen on testing coming from Microsoft, and it has only got better since then. I found out that Michael would be at SD West 2005. I wasn’t able to attend the conference–I was teaching in Sunnyvale that week. However, a a large number of my pals–colleagues involved with … Read more