(This post is adapted from my recent article on LinkedIn.) Out there in the world, there is a persistent notion that “preventing problems early in the software development process will lead to higher-quality products than testing later will”. That isn’t true. It’s untrue, but not for the reason that might first occur to most people. The issue is not that addressing problems early on is a bad idea. That’s usually … Read more
This is an extension on a long Twitter thread from a while back that made its way to LinkedIn, but not to my blog. Update, 2022/12/07: James Bach and I have recently changed “attended” to “interactive”, to emphasize the tester’s direct interaction with the product that happens during so-called “manual” testing. “Interactive” is more evocative of what’s going on than “attended” is, but it’s also true the tester’s interaction might … Read more
I used to speak at conferences. For the HUSTEF 2020 conference, I had intended to present a talk called “What’s Wrong with Manual Testing?” In the age of COVID, we’ve all had to turn into movie makers, so instead of delivering a speech, I delivered a video instead. After I had proposed the talk, and it was accepted, I went through a lot of reflection on what the big deal … Read more
Another tester on an “Agile” team complains of being overwhelmed by the volume of regression testing he says he must do at the end of each sprint. Why are some development organizations fixated on regression testing? Not why do they do it (that can be quite reasonable), but why are they fixated on it? I have a theory. It goes without saying that every change to the product or system … Read more
Here is an edition of the reply I offered to a question that someone asked on Quora. Bear in mind that it might be a good idea to follow the links for context. If we do sanity testing before release, do we have to do regression testing? What if I told you Yes? What if I told you No? Some questions shouldn’t be answered. That is: some questions shouldn’t be … Read more
As promised, (at last!) here are some follow-up notes on previous installments in the series that starts here. Let’s revisit the original question: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? To review: there’s a problem with the question. Asking about “exploratory testing” is a little like asking about “vegetarian cauliflower”, “carbon-based human beings”, or “metallic copper”. Testing is fundamentally exploratory. Testing is an attempt … Read more
In the last two posts, I’ve been answering the question Do you perform any exploratory testing on an API? How do you do it? Last time I described the process of learning about factors in the project environment that affect my strategy as I go about the testing of an API. This time, I’ll go deeper, learn more, and begin to interact with the product. That learning and interaction feeds … Read more
Summary: Loops of exploration, experimentation, studying, modeling, and learning are the essence of testing, not an add-on to it. The intersection of activity and models (such as the Heuristic Test Strategy Model) help us to perform testing while continuously developing, refining, and reviewing it. Testing is much more than writing a bunch of automated checks to confirm that the product can do something; it’s an ongoing investigation in which we … Read more
In one forum or another recently, a tester, developer or DevOps person (I wasn’t sure which of these he/she was) asked: Do you perform any exploratory testing on APIs? How do you do it? Here’s an in-depth version of the reply I gave, with the benefit of links to deeper material. To begin: application programming interfaces (APIs) are means by which we can use software to send commands to a … Read more
Some might believe that checking and exploratory work are antithetical. Not so. In our definition, checking is “the algorithmic process of operating and observing a product, applying decision rules to those observations, and reporting the outcome of those decision rules”. We might want to use some routine checks, but not all checks have to be rote. We can harness algorithms and tools to induce variation that can help us find … Read more