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Very Short Blog Posts (18): Ask for Testability

Whether you’re working in an Agile environment or not, one of the tester’s most important tasks is to ask and advocate for things that make a product more testable. Where to start? Think about visibility—in its simplest form, log files—and controllability in the form of scriptable application programming interfaces (APIs). Logs aren’t just for troubleshooting. Comprehensive log files can help to identify the data that was processed and the functions … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (17): Regression Obsession

Regression testing is focused on the risk that something that used to work in some way no longer works that way. A lot of organizations (Agile ones in particular) seem fascinated by regression testing (or checking) above all other testing activities. It’s a good idea to check for the risk of regression, but it’s also a good idea to test for it. Moreover, it’s a good idea to make sure … Read more

A Tale of Four Projects

Once upon time, in a high-tech business park far, far away, there were four companies, each working on a development project. In Project Blue, the testers created a suite of 250 test cases, based on 50 use cases, before development started. These cases remained static throughout the project. Each week saw incremental improvement in the product, although things got a little stuck towards the end. Project Blue kept a table … Read more

“In The Real World”

In Rapid Software Testing, James Bach, our colleagues, and I advocate an approach that puts the skill set and the mindset of the individual tester—rather than some document or tool or test case or process modelY—at the centre of testing. We advocate an exploratory approach to testing so that we find not only the problems that people have anticipated, but also the problems they didn’t anticipate. We challenge the value … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (16): Usability Problems Are Probably Testability Problems Too

Want to add ooomph to your reports of usability problems in your product? Consider that usability problems also tend to be testability problems, and vice versa. The design of the product may make it frustrating, inconsistent, slow, or difficult to learn. Poor affordances may conceal useful features and shortcuts. Missing help files could fail to address confusion; self-contradictory or misleading help files could add to it. All of these things … Read more

I’ve Had It With Defects

The longer I stay in the testing business and reflect on the matter, the more I believe the concept of “defects” to be unclear and unhelpful. A program may have a coding error that is clearly inconsistent with the program’s specification, whereupon I might claim that I’ve found a defect. The other day, an automatic product update failed in the middle of the process, rendering the product unusable. Apparently a … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (15): “Manual” and “Automated” Testers

“Help Wanted. Established scientific research lab seeks Intermediate Level Manual Scientist. Role is intended to complement our team of Automated and Semi-Automated Scientists. The successful candidate will perform research and scientific experiments without any use of tools (including computer hardware or software). Requires good communication skills and knowledge of the Hypothesis Development Life Cycle. Bachelor’s degree or five years of experience in manual science preferred.” Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? It … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (14): “It works!”

“It works” is one of Jerry Weinberg‘s nominees for the most ambiguous sentence in the English language. To me, when people say “it works”, they really mean Some aspect of some feature or some function appeared to meet some requirement to some degree based on some theory and based on some observation that some agent made under some conditions once or maybe more. One of the most important tasks for … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (13): When Will Testing Be Done?

When a decision maker asks “When will testing be done?”, in my experience, she really means is “When will I have enough information about the state of the product and the project, such that I can decide to release or deploy the product?” There are a couple of problems with the latter question. First, as Cem Kaner puts it, “testing is an empirical, technical investigation of the product, done on … Read more

Harry Collins and The Motive for Distinctions

“Computers and their software are two things. As collections of interacting cogs they must be ‘checked’ to make sure there are no missing teeth and the wheels spin together nicely. Machines are also ‘social prostheses’, fitting into social life where a human once fitted. It is a characteristic of medical prostheses, like replacement hearts, that they do not do exactly the same job as the thing they replace; the surrounding … Read more