(I’ve changed a couple of details here to maintain confidentiality. On the other hand, I’ll bet something like this has happened where you work, too.) A while ago I was working with a tester at a client site, and I observed a problem: one word in a status message dialog box was misspelled. Due to a frozen severity classification system and (worse) to the kind of thinking that accompanies it, … Read more
Continuing from yesterday… As you may recall, my correspondent remarked “To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.” Here’s an example of the importance of semantics in testing. … Read more
Commenting on testing and checking, one correspondent responds: “To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.” My very first job in software development was as a database programmer … Read more
Dale Emery, a colleague for whom we have great respect, submitted a comment on my last blog post, which in turn referred to Testing and Checking Refined on James Bach‘s blog. Dale says: I don’t see the link between your goals and your solution. Your solution seems to be (a) distinguishing what you call checking from what you call testing, (b) using the terms “checking” and “testing” to express the … Read more
Over the last few months, and especially during some face-to-face time that we had in England recently, James Bach and I have been working to sharpen our notions of testing and checking. Although the task had been on the list for some time, we didn’t get a sense of great urgency about it until we were surprised recently to find that, at a very subtle but important level, we meant … Read more
Another day has dawned on Planet Earth, so another tester has used LinkedIn to ask about the difference between severity and priority. The reason the tester is asking is, probably, that there’s a development project, and there’s probably a bug tracking system, and it probably contains fields for both severity and priority (and probably as numbers). The tester has probably been told to fill in each field as part of … Read more
If you’ve been in testing for long enough, you’ll eventually report or demonstrate a problem, and you’ll hear this: “No user would ever do that.” Translated into English, that means “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose, or in a way that I’ve imagined.” So here are a few ideas that might help to spur imagination. The user made a simple mistake, … Read more
The categories “manual testing” and “automated testing” (and their even less helpful byproducts, “manual tester” and “automated tester”) were arguably never meaningful, but they’ve definitely outlived their sell-by date. Can we please put them in the compost bin now? Thank you. Here’s a long and excellent rant by pilot Patrick Smith, who for years has been trying to address a similar problem in the way people talk (and worse, think) … Read more
In the past, James Bach and I have defined “oracle” as “a principle or mechanism by which we recognize a problem,” and we’ve focused on principles rooted in ideas about consistency and inconsistency. At its foundation, applying an oracle and recognizing a problem always involves some principle that links an observation of a product to someone’s desires for it. That is: we observe a problem when we see some kind … Read more
In the previous post, Lynn McKee recognized that, with respect to the Comparable Product oracle heuristic, “comparable” can be have several expansive interpretations, and not just one narrow one. I’ll emphasize: “comparable product”, in the context of the FEW HICCUPPS oracle heuristics, can mean any software product, any attribute of a software product, or even attributes of non-software products that we could use as a basis for comparison. (Since “comparable … Read more