This is a first stab at a frequently-asked questions list about the movement to stop ISO 29119. Here I speak for myself, and not for the community. If you see “we”, it refers to my perception of the community at large, but not necessarily to the whole community; your mileage may vary. There is plenty of discussion in the community; Huib Schoots is curating a collection of resources on the … Read more
The proponents of ISO Standard 29119 proudly claim that they have received and responded to “literally thousands” of comments during the process of drafting the standard. So I thought it might be interesting to examine how one component of the basic model has changed or evolved through the course of its development. Here’s a screenshot of a diagram that illustrates the test planning process, taken from a presentation given in … Read more
At CAST 2014, a quiet, modest, thoughtful, and very experienced man named James Christie gave a talk called “Standards: Promoting Quality or Restricting Competition?”. The talk followed on from his tutorial at EuroSTAR 2013 on working with auditors—James is a former auditor himself—and from his blogs on software standards over the years. James’ talk introduced to our community the term rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the act of using political means—the exercise … Read more
Formal testing is testing that must be done in a specific way, or to check specific facts. In the Rapid Software Testing methodology, we map the formality of testing on a continuum. Sometimes it’s important to do testing in a formal way, and sometimes it’s not so important. From Rapid Software Testing. See http://www.satisfice.com/rst.pdf People sometimes tell me that they must test their software using a particular formal approach—for example, … Read more
Like software products, models change as we test them, gain experience with them, find bugs in them, realize that features are missing. We see opportunities for improving them, and revise them. A product coverage outline, in Rapid Testing parlance, is an artifact (a map, or list, or table…) that identifies the dimensions or elements of a product. It’s a kind of inventory of aspects of the product that could be … Read more
A few weeks ago, I posted a Very Short Blog Post on the bare-bones basics of testability. Today, I saw a very good post from Adam Knight talking about telling the testability story. Adam focused, as I did, on intrinsic testability—things in the product itself that it more testable. But testability isn’t just a product attribute. In Heuristics of Testability (material we developed in a session of Rapid Software Testing … Read more
presented by the EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference
Michael Bolton hosted a live Google Hangout where he will discuss his recent Masterclass entitled:
‘How to get what you want from Testing’.
(For Testers, Developers & Managers)
In this session, Michael explained the role of skilled software testers, and why you might not want to think of testing as “quality assurance”.
EuroSTAR Conferences, with the support of ISA Software Skillnet, Irish Software Innovation Network and SoftTest, were delighted to bring you a half-day software testing masterclass with Michael Bolton In this session, Michael Bolton (who has extensive experience as a tester, as a programmer, and as a project manager) explained the role of skilled software testers, and why you might not want to think of testing as “quality assurance”. He present … Read more
How do people use a software product? Some development groups model use through use cases. Typically use cases are expressed in terms of the user performing a set of step-by-step behaviours: 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. In those groups, testers may create test cases that map directly onto the use cases. Sometimes, that gets called a scenario, and the testing of it is called a scenario … Read more
Every now and then, in some forum or another, someone says something like “75% of the testing done on an Agile project is done by automation”. Whatever else might be wrong with that statement, it’s a very strange way to describe a complex, cognitive process of learning about a product through experimentation, and seeking to find problems that threaten the value of the product, the project, or the business. Perhaps … Read more