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Once Again: The Created Artifact Isn’t the Point; The Creative Process Is

(Yet another post that started on LinkedIn…) There’s lots of advice out there on how to use Large Language Models to generate test ideas, test data, or test cases. Everything I’ve done and seen myself suggests that the test ideas from LLMs are pretty generic, banal, and uninspired. Considering how LLMs work, this is unsurprising. The majority of LLMs are trained on testing material from the Web, where the overwhelming … Read more

We Have to Run the Regression Tests!

This is a lightly-edited version of a post I made on LinkedIn, which in turn was a followup to the previous post. “We have to run a full regression test suite on every build!” First: you don’t have to do anything. There is no law of nature, nor any human regulation, that says you must repeat any particular test. You choose to do things. (You don’t have to automate. You … Read more

Interview with Testing Minutes

About the episodeTesting seems like an easy task. But how do we test effectively and find really surprising problems? What does it mean to explore and experience the product? How can emotions help with testing? All about Rapid Software Testing (and beyond) Oleksandr Romanov (SET at IOHK) and Artem Grygorenko (QA Coach) talk with guest Michael Bolton! ℹ️ What exactly we talked about: About the guest Michael Bolton   / michael-bolton-08847   📣 … Read more

Testing AI : five obstacles and seven workarounds

‍Recorded for the 3rd Zebrunner Expert Series Webinar we discuss the noise and help you understand what AI truly is and what it means for testing practices. There’s an incredible amount of noise around artificial intelligence these days, but very little reliable signal. AI will bring doom and destruction, or a world where cheerful robots feed us peeled grapes while we lie on the couch. Some say AI is already … Read more

Making Progress on Regression Testing

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

Sharper Terms for “Manual Testing”

This is a lightly-edited excerpt from a longer blog post that you’ll find here. I recommend you read it too, but if you’re short on time, here’s the core of it. If you care about understanding the status of your product, you’ll probably care about testing it. You’ll want testing to find out if the product you’ve got is the product you want. If you care about that, you need … Read more

Test Tools Need Testing

In any testing situation, when you’re using a tool, you must understand its working principles. You must know what it can and cannot do. You must know how to configure it, and how to calibrate it, how to observe it in action, and how to adjust or repair it when it’s not working properly. To do THAT effectively, you must be able to recognize when your tool is not working. … Read more

Language Models

“Language models” is typically interpreted as a compound noun, something that models language. A model is an idea in your mind, an activity, or an object (such as a diagram, a list of words, a spreadsheet, a role play, a person, a toy, an equation, a demonstration, or a program…) that represents (literally! re-presents!) another idea, activity, or object (such as something complex that you need to work with or … Read more

The First Hurdle Heuristic

There is a testing techique that I often apply. I have recently decided to name it the First Hurdle Heuristic. The basic idea: get the product out of the starter’s blocks, and see how it performs given a relatively easy challenge. This heuristic can useful when you want to identify problems and risks immediately, or to determine whether a product might not be ready for use or for deeper testing. … Read more

“Missing Requirements”

This article was inspired by a thread on LinkedIn a while back. Thank you to Rahul Parwal for starting the thread off. People sometimes suggest that requirements are unavailable, when what they really mean is that requirement documents aren’t available. That distinction is significant. (Plus, if requirement documents aren’t available… what are the programmers working from?) There might not be great requirements documents, but there are always requirements. There’s always … Read more