A correspondent on the Agile Testing mailing list asked recently Shall automated acceptance tests use the GUI the app provides? My reply sat in my drafts folder for a while, and I just found it. Too late for the conversation, really, so I’ll post it here. My thought, as usual, is that automated acceptance tests checks should or should not use the GUI depending on the questions you want to … Read more
Part of the Rapid Software Testing philosophy involves reducing waste wherever possible. For many organizations, documentation is an area where we might want to cut the clutter. It’s not that documentation is valueless, but every minute that we spend on documentation is a minute that we can’t spend on any other activity. Thus the value of the documentation has to be compared not only to its own cost, but to … Read more
Recently I went to parent-teacher night at my 10-year-old stepson’s school. Above the door to his classroom is a list of heuristics for solving problems that I think is just dandy for testers. They’re not called heuristics there, but that’s what they are. Use logical reasoning Work backwards Make a picture or diagram Use or look for a pattern Make it simpler Guess and check Use or make a table … Read more
With the current mania for AI-based systems, we’re finally starting to hear murmurs of moderation and the potential for risk. How do we test systems that incorporate an LLM? You already know how something about how to test LLM systems if you know how to test. Testing starts with doubt, and with a desire to look at things critically. The other day on LinkedIn, Paramjit Singh Aujla presented a problem … Read more
This happened to me again today in Quicken. It’s happened before. Worse, it’s an example of an extremely common phenomenon. My task here is to send an invoice to a particular person at a particular company. I fill in a part of a form — an address field — that appears right under the word “Invoice”. It’s not the topmost input element on the dialog, but it’s definitely the most naturalistic … Read more
One of the reasons that software development and testing are screwed up is because people often name things carelessly. Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out that “floating point” was the kind of math where the decimal point stayed in the same place, where in “fixed point”, the decimal point moves around. People talk about “serverless computing”, when they really mean “computing using someone else’s servers”. “No-code testing tools”… well, … Read more
Vipul Kocher is a fellow whom I have known for a long time. I think we met in North America in the mid 2000s. I know I visited his company in Noida, New Delhi about 15 years ago, and spoke with his testers for an hour or so. On that occasion, I also visited his family and had a memorable home-cooked meal, followed by a mad dash in a sport … Read more
In the previous post, I described ChatGPT as being a generator of bullshit. Some might say that’s unfair to ChatGPT, because bullshit is “speech intended to persuade without regard for truth”. ChatGPT, being neither more nor less than code, has no intentions of its own; nor does it have a concept of truth, never mind regard for it, and therefore can’t be held respsonsible for the text that it produces. … Read more
A little while back, on LinkedIn, Jason Arbon posted a long article that included a lengthy conversation he had with ChatGPT. The teaser for the article is “A little humility and curiosity will keep you one step ahead of the competition — and the machines.” The title of the article is “Testing: Bolt-on AI” and in Jason’s post linking to it, I’m tagged, along with my Rapid Software Testing colleague … Read more
After 20 years of working together to develop the Rapid Software Testing approach, James Bach and I have decided that — improbable as it may seem — it’s time to wrap it all up. Perhaps this will be a surprise to our followers in the community, but we now must confront what we previously thought was unimaginable: recent developments in technology have, for all intents and purposes, made testing obsolete. … Read more