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
I was investigating some oddness in Google Search today. Perhaps I’ll write about that later. But for now, here’s something I stumbled upon as I was evaluating one of the search results. Is this a problem? I think the developers of this site mean to say “Free delivery in the GTA for orders over $99″. (The GTA is the Greater Toronto Area.) Next question: is this a big problem? Will … Read more
Every fifteen minutes or so, in testing blogs, on LinkedIn, at conferences, or on the job, someone raises the question of “why test automation projects fail”. Perhaps the question keeps coming up because there are so many failure modes, and so many possible answers. Here’s one answer, though: “test automation projects” are software development projects, and all software development projects are vulnerable to failure. One of the bigger and more … Read more
It’s common these days to hear people say that they don’t want to focus on finding bugs; they want to focus on preventing bugs. They want to focus on “building quality in”. Let’s face it: building quality in is a pretty great idea, and preventing bugs from reaching customers is a really good thing. On this, reasonable people agree. To prevent bugs from reaching customers, you’ll have to become a … Read more
Selenium! Playwright! Cypress! Postman! There’s constant hubbub around these tools and others primarily focused on checking output—and now the din is getting louder about low-code or no-code tools for checking output. (Last year I reviewed a couple of those, here and here. Did these companies use their own tools to test their own tools? Either a Yes or No answer would be disturbing.) Want some heuristics for choosing tools of … Read more
A tester asks… How do we handle production bugs? When management asks “Did you test this?”. how do I respond? When management asks “Why didn’t you find that bug?”, the first step is to accept in your own mind responsibility for looking for bugs, but not a commitment to finding every bug. The latter is a great aspiration, but an unreasonable commitment, and management shouldn’t be holding you to it. … 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
After almost a year of the blog lying fallow, it’s time to continue the series on Testing Deep and Shallow that begins here. (Shallow testing (not an insult!) is testing that has a chance of finding every easy bug. Deep testing maximizes the chance of finding every elusive bug that matters.) Premise 6 of Rapid Software Testing is about cost and value. “We commit to performing credible, cost-effective testing, and … 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 that we mean “shallow” to be an insult. But we don’t. “Shallow” is not an insult. Depth and shallowness are ways of talking about the thoroughness of testing, but they’re not assessments of its value. The value or quality or … Read more
This story is put together from several parallel experiences over the last while that I’ve merged into one narrative. The pattern of experiences and epiphanies is the same, but as they used to say on TV, names and details have been changed to protect the innocent. I was recently involved in testing an online shopping application. In the app, there’s a feature that sends notifications via email. On the administration … Read more