The previous post in this series provided a detailed description of testing framed in terms of Intention, Discipline, Testability, and Realization: It might be tempting to unroll these frames by starting in the top right, and rearranging them in a nice, tidy, linear sequence: Although it’s not the way people usually talk about it, you could think of this as a kind of end-to-end testing. Most of the time, so … Read more
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
Conversations about testing in all kinds of places have been going pear-shaped for a long time. As Jerry Weinberg was fond of pointing out, the word “testing” is overloaded, lumping a variety of ideas and activities together. The word “testing” gets applied to different actitivities, performed by different people, working in different contexts, performing different tasks with different priorities, at different moments in the development process. No wonder that people … Read more
This post picks up on a small LinkedIn essay from a few months back. There’s a fair amount of preamble here before I talk about regression testing as such. Be careful; you might have heard about testing and checking from people who don’t talk about it the ways we do in Rapid Software Testing (RST). If you’re familiar with RST, maybe you’re fine jumping here. If you’re not so familiar … 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
To all managers and executives: despite how it’s in fashion these days, it’s not a good time to be laying off testers, or to be leaving them unprepared and untrained. Software can be wonderful. It can help us with all kinds of stuff, unimaginably quickly and at enormous scale. This sounds very appealing. Skilled testers, at least, have always known that we must treat output from machinery with appropriate skepticism … Read more
This post and the ones that follow represent an expansion on a thread I started on LinkedIn. On September 30, 2023, Vipul Kocher — a fellow with whom I have been on friendly terms since I visited his company and his family for lunch in Delhi about 15 years ago — posted a kind of testing challenge on LinkedIn. I strongly encourage you to read the post. I’ll begin by … 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
Frequently, both online and in face-to-fact conversations, testers express reservations to me about making a clear distinction between testing and checking when talking to others. It’s true: “test” is an overloaded word. In some contexts, it refers to a heuristic process: evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing, exploring and experimenting; that’s what testers refer to when they’re talking about testing, and that’s how we describe it in … Read more
When we talk about deep and shallow testing in the Rapid Software Testing namespace, some people might assume that we mean “deep testing” is good and decent and honourable and pure, and that we mean “shallow” to be an insult, based on some kind of moral judgement. But we don’t. “Shallow” is not an insult. It is a description. Depth and shallowness are ways of talking about the thoroughness of … Read more