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Ask Me Anything with Michael Bolton

QA ATL 2020 Day 2.5http://www.qaatl.com From the YouTube description… Too often, conference sessions don’t allow enough time for questions and answers. For QA ATL, Michael Bolton will deliver a conference session that is nothing but questions and answers. Michael invites you to ask him anything about topics near and dear to him, including (but not limited to) developing test strategy, recognizing problems in products, thinking critically, analyzing risk, applying tools, … Read more

Lessons Learned from a Little Bug

Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts on project estimation and black swans. And, almost 10 years after that, Chris NeJame reported an observation about the following passage towards the end of Part 4 of the series: As Jerry (Weinberg) has frequently pointed out, plenty of organizations fall victim to back luck, but much of the time, it’s not the bad luck that does them in; … Read more

Testing Doesn’t Add Value to the Product

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

Expected Results

Klára Jánová is a dedicated tester who studies and practices and advocates Rapid Software Testing. Recently, on LinkedIn, she said: I might EXPECT something to happen. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I WANT IT/DESIRE for IT to happen. I even may want it to happen, but it not happening doesn’t have to automatically mean that there’s a problem. The point of this post: no more “expected results” in the … Read more

“Why Didn’t We Catch This in QA?”

My good friend Keith Klain recently posted this on LinkedIn: “Why didn’t we catch this in QA” might possibly be the most psychologically terrorizing and dysfunctional software testing culture an organization can have. I’ve seen it literally destroy good people and careers. It flies in the face of systems thinking, complexity of failure, risk management, and just about everything we know about the psychology involved in testing, but the bully … Read more

It’s Not About The Typing

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

A Testopsy: Learning from Performance

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

Breaking the Test Case Addiction (Part 12)

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

Breaking the Test Case Addiction (Part 11)

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