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In Rapid Software Testing, James Bach, our colleagues, and I advocate an approach that puts the skill set and the mindset of the individual tester—rather than some document or tool or test case or process modelY—at the centre of testing. We advocate an exploratory approach to testing so that we find not only the problems that people have anticipated, but also the problems they didn’t anticipate. We challenge the value … Read more

Apropos of my recent post responding to the sentiment “We have to automate”, I got a splendid example of the suppressed choice again today. If you haven’t read that post, you might find it helpful to read it now to set the context for my main point here. It started when I was sitting at home this morning, using my laptop. The dialog below popped up on my screen. Clicking … Read more

A recent posting (apparently no longer available) on LinkedIn entitled “Why Is Automated Software Testing A Better Choice?”, prompted some discussion. (As usual, the question “better than what?” was begged.) Then came this comment from my friend Jon Hagar: “There are … environments where the team must automate, e.g. a fast embedded control system where computation cycle is 10ms.” You might be inclined to agree with Jon, and I might … Read more

In my teaching and consulting work, I often ask people how they recognize a problem, and they often offer “inconsistency with expectations” as one way to do it. I agree, but I also think we should be careful to think things through. A product that fulfills our expectations may not be satisfying, and a product that violates our expectations may be terrific. Several years ago, I bought a new computer … Read more

The title of this post, “Your User Is Not You”, is cheerfully cribbed from a fellow named David Platt, who wrote a pointed and very funny book called Why Software Sucks…and What You Can Do About It. He also gave a terrific talk at SD West 2007, excerpts of which you can see here and here. Attending that talk was one of the highlights of that year for me. Today … Read more

Apropos of my post from the other day and the inconsistency with image oracle heuristic, have a look here. I actually encountered this dialog myself several years ago. As one person commenting on the blog post reports, this security message from Windows has a typo in it (“form”, where it should be “from”), which has the ironic effect of making a security warning look even more like malware than it … Read more

(I’ve changed a couple of details here to maintain confidentiality. On the other hand, I’ll bet something like this has happened where you work, too.) A while ago I was working with a tester at a client site, and I observed a problem: one word in a status message dialog box was misspelled. Due to a frozen severity classification system and (worse) to the kind of thinking that accompanies it, … Read more

Continuing from yesterday… As you may recall, my correspondent remarked “To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.” Here’s an example of the importance of semantics in testing. … Read more

The categories “manual testing” and “automated testing” (and their even less helpful byproducts, “manual tester” and “automated tester”) were arguably never meaningful, but they’ve definitely outlived their sell-by date. Can we please put them in the compost bin now? Thank you. Here’s a long and excellent rant by pilot Patrick Smith, who for years has been trying to address a similar problem in the way people talk (and worse, think) … Read more