My colleague and friend Eric Jacobson, who recently (as I write) did a bang-up job on his first conference presentation at STAR West 2011, asks a question in response to this blog post from 2006. (I like it when people reflect on an issue for a few years.) Eric asks: You are suggesting it may not make sense for testers to give time-based estimates to their teams, but what about … Read more
A heuristic is a fallible method for solving a problem or making a decision. “Heuristic” as an adjective means “something that helps us to learn”. In testing, an oracle is a heuristic principle or mechanism by which we recognize a problem. Some years ago, during a lunch break from the Rapid Software Testing class, a tester remarked that he was having a good time, but that he wanted to know … Read more
Today, someone on Twitter pointed to an interesting blog post by Alan Page of Microsoft. He says: “How do testers determine if a bug is a bug anyone would care about vs. a bug that directly impacts quality (or the customers perception of quality)? (or something in between?) Of course, testers should report anything that may annoy a user, but learning to differentiate between an ‘it could be better’ bug … Read more
In this post, I’ll highlight a few more of the people that I met at EuroSTAR 2010. Please note that because there were so many people that I’d like to mention, there’s still more to come in subsequent posts. Also, I’ve included tons of links to these people and their work. Please use those links! Shmuel Gershon (@sgershon on Twitter) was in the Test Lab a lot, only one of … Read more
Way way back in 2003, Bret Pettichord first published a paper on schools of software testing. The paper was controversial. Some people found it helpful to identify different schools of thought, for the purpose of understanding ways in which reasonable people might disagree reasonably. Others found even the mention of disagreements within the field to be distasteful and divisive. Some people identified with particular schools. Others, sometimes indignantly, refused to … Read more
In this series of blog posts, I’ve been talking about project estimation. But I’m a tester, and if you’re reading this blog, presumably you’re a tester too, or at least you’re interested in testing. So, all this has might have been interesting for project estimation in general, but what are the implications for test project estimation? Let’s start with the tester’s approach: question the question. Is there ever such a … Read more
Last time out, we determined that mucking with the estimate to account for variance and surprises in projects is in several ways wanting. This time, we’ll make some choices about the tasks and the projects, and see where those choices might take us. Leave Problem Tasks Incomplete; Accept Missing Features There are a couple of variations on this strategy. The first is to Blow The Whistle At 100. That is, … Read more
There’s a mildly rollicking little discussion going on the in the Software Testing Club at the moment, in which Rob Lambert observes, “I’ve seen a couple of conversations recently where people are talking about red, green and yellow box testing.” Rob then asks “There’s the obvious black and white. How many more are there?” (For what it’s worth, I’ve already made some comments about a related question here.) At one … Read more
I have four or five blog posts in the hopper, each almost ready to go. I’m working on a whole book and a chapter of another one, and I’m on a deadline that I’m about to blow. The kids are still out of school, and I really should be cooking dinner right now. And yet… As I write, one of the best testers that I know is looking for work. … Read more
Gojko Adzic recently wrote a blog post called Let’s Change the Tune on some of our approaches in agile development. In changing the tune, some of the current words won’t fit so well, so he proposes (for example), “Specifying Collaboratively instead of test first or writing acceptance tests”. I have one more: I think we should change the label “acceptance tests”. Acceptance tests are given a central role in agile … Read more