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Very Short Blog Posts (26): You Don’t Need Acceptance Criteria to Test

You do not need acceptance criteria to test. Reporters do not need acceptance criteria to investigate and report stories; scientists do not need acceptance criteria to study and learn about things; and you do not need acceptance criteria to explore something, to experiment with it, to learn about it, or to provide a description of it. You could use explicit acceptance criteria as a focusing heuristic, to help direct your … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (25): Testers Don’t Break the Software

Plenty of testers claim that they break the software. They don’t really do that, of course. Software doesn’t break; it simply does what it has been designed and coded to do, for better or for worse. Testers investigate systems, looking at what the system does; discovering and reporting on where and how the software is broken; identifying when the system will fail under load or stress. It might be a … Read more

Give Us Back Our Testing

“Program testing involves the execution of a program over sample test data followed by analysis of the output. Different kinds of test output can be generated. It may consist of final values of program output variables or of intermediate traces of selected variables. It may also consist of timing information, as in real time systems. “The use of testing requires the existence of an external mechanism which can be used … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (24): You Are Not a Bureaucrat

Here’s a pattern I see fairly often at the end of bug reports: Expected: “Total” field should update and display correct result. Actual: “Total” field updates and displays incorrect result. Come on. When you write a report like that, can you blame people for thinking you’re a little slow? Or that you’re a bureaucrat, and that testing work is mindless paperwork and form-filling? Or perhaps that you’re being condescending? It … Read more

The Rapid Software Testing Namespace

Just as no one has the right to tell you what language to speak at home, nobody outside of your project has the authority to tell you how to speak inside your project. Every project develops its own namespace, so to speak, and its own formal or informal criteria for naming things inside it. Rapid Software Testing is, among other things, a project in that sense. For years, James Bach … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (23) – No Certification? No Problem!

Another testing meetup, and another remark from a tester that hiring managers and recruiters won’t call her for an interview unless she has an ISEB or ISTQB certification. “They filter résumés based on whether you have the certification!” Actually, people probably go to even less effort than that; they more likely get a machine to search for a string of characters. So if you’re looking for a testing job, you … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (22): “That wouldn’t be practical”

I have this conversation rather often. A test manager asks, “We’ve got a development project coming up that is expected to take six months. How do I provide an estimate for how long it will take to test it?” My answer would be “Six months.” Testing begins as soon as someone has an idea for a new product, service, or feature, and testing ends, for the most part when someone … Read more

Taking Severity Seriously

There’s a flaw in the way most organizations classify the severity of a bug. Here’s an example from the Elementool Web site (as of 14 January, 2015); I’m sure you’ve seen something like it: Critical: The bug causes a failure of the complete software system, subsystem or a program within the system. High: The bug does not cause a failure, but causes the system to produce incorrect, incomplete, inconsistent results … Read more

When Programmers (and Testers) Do Their Jobs

For a long time, I’ve admired Robert (“Uncle Bob”) Martin’s persistent advocacy of craftsmanship in programming and software development. Recently on Twitter, he said . @LlewellynFalco When programmers do their jobs, testers find nothing. — Uncle Bob Martin (@unclebobmartin) December 8, 2014 One of the most important tasks in the testing role is to identify alternative interpretations of apparently clear and simple statements. Uncle Bob’s statement appears clear and simple, … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (21): You Had It Last!

Sometimes testers say to me “My development team (or the support people, or the managers) keeping saying that any bugs in the product are the testers’ fault. ‘It’s obvious that any bug in the product is the tester’s responsibility,’ they say, ‘since the tester had the product last.’ How do I answer them?” Well, you could say that the product’s problems are the responsibility of the tester because the tester … Read more