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Very Short Blog Posts (9): “Insufficient Requirements”

Some people say they “don’t have enough requirements to start testing,” or that the requirements are unclear or incomplete or contradictory or out of date. First, those people usually mean requirements documents; don’t confuse that with requirements, which may be explicit or tacit. There are plenty of sources of requirements-related information, and it’s a tester’s job to discover them and make inferences about them. Second, insufficient clarity about requirements is … Read more

Can You Hear The Alarm Bells?

Many people seem certain about what happened to cause the healthcare.gov fiasco. Stories are starting to trickle out, and eventually they’ll be an ocean of them. To anyone familiar with software development, especially in large organizations, these stories include familiar elements of character and plot. From those, it’s easy to extrapolate and fill in the details based on imagination and experience. We all know what happened. Well, we don’t. In … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (8): Two Big Questions

Too often testing is focused on getting the right answers, rather than asking worthwhile questions and helping to get them answered. There are at least two overarching questions that a tester must ask. While looking directly at the product, at its customers, at the project, at the business, and at the relationships between them, the tester’s first question — and a question the tester must ask continuously, expansively, and tacitly … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (7): Planning vs. Preparation

Imagine a software project. Imagine the things that you want to accomplish, the problems you might encounter, the workarounds you could apply, the accidents (both happy and sad) that might happen, the missteps you may take, the steps you can take to prevent them; all of the actions you can perform to manage the project. Now, make a detailed plan that takes all of your expectations into account. The more … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (6): Validating Assumptions

Some may say that the purpose of testing is to validate assumptions made by business analysts, designers, or developers. To me, that is at best a potential side effect of testing—but not the goal. If you want testing to reveal important problems in the product, do not focus on validating assumptions (to do so would be more like checking; testing may include some checking). To foster discovery, excellent testing—like excellent … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (5): Understanding the Requirements

People often suggest that “understanding the requirements” is an essential step before you can begin testing. This may be true for checking or formal testing—examining a product in a specific way, or to check specific facts. But understanding the requirements is not a necessary precursor to testing, which is learning about a product through experimentation (a larger activity which might include checking) and creating the conditions to make that activity … Read more

Interview and Interrogation

In response to my post from a couple of days ago, Gus kindly provides a comment, and I think a discussion of it is worth a blog post on its own. Michael, I appreciate what you are trying to say but the simile doesn’t really work 100% for me, let me try to explain. The simile has prompted you to think and to question, so in that sense, it works … Read more

Interview Questions

Imagine that you are working for me, and that I want your help in qualifying and hiring new staff. I start by giving you my idea of how to interview a candidate for a job. “Prepare a set of questions with specific, predetermined answers. Asking questions is expensive, so make sure to come up with as few questions as you can. Ask the candidate those questions, and only those questions. … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (4): Leaves and Trees

Having trouble understanding why James Bach and I think it’s important to distinguish between checking and testing? Consider this: a pile of leaves is not a tree. Leaves are important parts of trees, but there’s a lot more to a tree than just its leaves. The leaves owe their existence to being part of a larger system of the tree. Nature makes sure that leaves drop off and are replaced … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (3): The Software Is Already Broken

Some testers have got into the habit of saying that “we break the software”. That leads to psychological and political problems: “The product was fine until the testers broke it.” The software is what it is, either broken or not, when we get it. So, try saying “We look for problems that could threaten the value of the software.” As James Bach says, the only things we break are illusions.