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Another tester on an “Agile” team complains of being overwhelmed by the volume of regression testing he says he must do at the end of each sprint. Why are some development organizations fixated on regression testing? Not why do they do it (that can be quite reasonable), but why are they fixated on it? I have a theory. It goes without saying that every change to the product or system … Read more

Software testing can be socially difficult because of people’s natural desire to avoid trouble. This prompts them to avoid thinking about trouble, which means that they don’t look for it. But if you don’t try to find the trouble that’s in your product, that trouble will eventually find you. Some might say we do think about trouble, and we try to avoid it by getting clear on our intentions in … Read more

Testers consistently ask how to show (or demonstrate, or prove, or calculate) that testing adds value. Programmers, designers, and other builders create and add value by creating and building and improving the product. Testing does not add value to the product. And that’s fine. Managers assure quality by helping programmers, designers, and others to obtain the resources they need, and by removing (or at least reducing) obstacles to their work. … Read more

Garbage truckloads of marketing bumph are being dumped into the testing space about “codeless” testing tools. For the companies producing these tools, to “test” seems to mean “performing a sequence of keystrokes or mouse clicks or button presses on an app”. (You can see the same pattern in many tutorials on “test automation”; write a script that executes a sequence of actions, and that’s a “test”.) But the marketing material … Read more

What’s the difference between Rapid Software Testing (RST) and other forms of testing? In RST, the process model is not the centre of testing; neither is formal documentation; nor are tools. All of those things play a role in testing, of course, but they’re not at the centre. In RST, the centre of testing is the skill set and the mindset of the individual tester, and heuristics that testers apply. … Read more

In previous posts in this series, I made a claim about the audience for a test report: They almost certainly don’t want to know about when the testing is going to be done (although they might think they do). It’s true that managers frequently ask testers when the testing will be done. That’s a hard question to answer, but maybe not for reasons that you—or they—might have considered. By definition, … Read more

In the previous post in this series, I made these claims about the audience for test reports: It’s far more likely that they want an answer to these questions: What is the actual status of the product? Are there problems that threaten the value of the product? How do you—the tester—know? Do these problems threaten the on-time, successful completion of our work? In this post, I’ll address the first two … Read more

Last time, Frieda and I had been looking at visualizations of time spent on various testing activities, include work that foster test coverage of the product (T time), bug investigation and reporting (B time) and setup work to get ready to test, or tidying up afterwards (S time). “So…,” Frieda mused, “I could track T-time, and B-time, and S-time. But I’d be a little worried about watching the clock all … Read more

The year was 2006. James Bach and I were running a workshop at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference (AYE). We were in one of those large-ish, high-ceiling conference rooms with about 15 programmers and software consultants. We were showing them one of James Lyndsay’s wonderful testing machines. (You can find it here, but you’ll need Flash active to run it.) It looked like this: At first, it’s all very confusing. … Read more