Heuristic: Tenets vs. tenants
Here’s a heuristic: when someone is describing (or, especially, dissing) some practice or methodology, don’t bother taking them seriously unless they know the difference between tenants and tenets. Examples abound.
Heuristics of GUI Automation Tools
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
The White Glove Heuristic and The "Unless…" Heuristic
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
Heuristic Approaches Everywhere
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
AI and Rapid Software Testing
In our forthcoming book, Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach, James Bach and I have included a chapter on AI. AI is fraught with risk, but writing about it is too. All through its history (since the 1950s, NOT just since 2022 or 2012), “AI” has not been an engineering term, but a marketing term, without clear notions of what “artificial intellience” really means. And all along, the … Read more
Four Frames for Testing, Part 7: Critical Distance
There’s a popular trope in the software development world these days that suggests that everybody on the team is responsible for testing. With that idea in mind, some people take an extreme position: since everyone tests, no one needs dedicated testers any more. Developers can do all the testing; or business analysts can do all the testing; or the customers can do all the testing. Then there’s another notion (which, … Read more
Four Frames for Testing, Part 5: Intention, Discipline, Testability, Realization
In the last post, I introduced four frames for testing, each of which might present a set of ideas for covering a product with testing at various points through its development. On the way to a complete package, system, or service, people produce many different ideas and artifacts, each of which can be tested. Moreover, people with different interests, temperaments, and roles in the development process perceive testing in different … Read more
Four Frames for Testing, Part 3: What the Business Wants from Testing
In the previous installment, we looked at what the business wants: a product of high value, and one for which costs of development and will be low. This time we’ll look from a slightly different angle: how does the business get what it wants? There is a kind of universal development cycle. No matter what your development model might be, it probably looks something like this: Since it’s a cycle, … Read more
Four Frames for Testing, Part 2: Four Kinds of Risk
In the first installment of this series, I introduced two key things that the business wants from development: a product of high value and low cost. In order for the business to get a high-value product, we must envision success so we can set about building it. And yet… there’s risk. It’s easy to assume that we’ve built a high-value product, and that cost to the business is low and … Read more
Testing is Not Quality; Quality is Not Testing
Please remember: there’s a big difference between quality and testing; and so there’s a big difference between a quality strategy and a testing strategy. Understand the Nature of Quality The essence of quality is value to people. A quality strategy is a set of guiding ideas for building a product or service, in order to achieve the goal(s) of providing value to people. To develop a successful product, the people … Read more