Recently, during a coaching session, a tester was wrestling with something that was a mystery to her. She asked: Why do some tech leaders (for example, CTOs, development managers, test managers, and test leads) jump straight to test cases when they want to provide traceability, share testing efforts with stakeholders, and share feature knowledge with testers? I’m not sure. I fear that most of the time, fixation on test cases … 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
For years at conferences and meetups and in social media, I have been hearing regularly from testers who tell me that they must “sign off” on the product or deployment before it is released to production, or to review by the client. The testers claim that, after they have performed some degree of testing work, they must “approve” or “reject” the product. Here’s a fairly typical verbatim report from one … Read more
Michael Bolton – Testing is Testing – Agile is Context / Change 2018
Closing keynote – Michael Bolton – Testing is Testing; Agile is Context
Presented by KING ICT
CHANGE AROUND THE WEB: WEB: http://changecon.com/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheChangeCon
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/TheChangeCon/
As a tester, I try to represent the interests of users. Saying the user, in the singular, feels like a trap to me. There are usually lots of users, and they tend to have diverse and sometimes competing interests. I’d like to represent and highlight the interests of users that might have been forgotten or overlooked. There’s another trap, though. As Cem Kaner has pointed out, it’s worth remembering that … Read more
This post is a lightly-edited transcript from a LinkedIn article, which was itself adapted and extended from a recent thread on Twitter. Another day, another story that goes like this. A colleague tells me that he’s working with an organization by training developers in how to do testing. That sounds like a pretty good idea at first, although most developers are already pretty good at the kind of testing that … Read more
Here is an edition of the reply I offered to a question that someone asked on Quora. Bear in mind that it might be a good idea to follow the links for context. If we do sanity testing before release, do we have to do regression testing? What if I told you Yes? What if I told you No? Some questions shouldn’t be answered. That is: some questions shouldn’t be … Read more
Sigma Software
Michael Bolton, Software Testing Coach, author of Rapid Software Testing, consultant and influencer talks about Ukrainian QA specialists and their expertise and shares his ideas on “must-have” knowledge and skills for a good Test Engineer. The interview was taken during his three-day training organized by QA Fest and hosted by Sigma Software in Kiev.
I get this question a lot: a tester who has just learned to program, or who has just learned about a new framework or tool set asks “Now that I’ve learned this, what should I automate?” Some people (mostly men, so it seems) go into hardware stores and see some fancy tool like a compound mitre saw. Unable to resist temptation, they imagine themselves building… something. So they buy the … Read more
As promised, (at last!) here are some follow-up notes on previous installments in the series that starts here. Let’s revisit the original question: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? To review: there’s a problem with the question. Asking about “exploratory testing” is a little like asking about “vegetarian cauliflower”, “carbon-based human beings”, or “metallic copper”. Testing is fundamentally exploratory. Testing is an attempt … Read more