I’m delighted to have been asked to present a lunchtime talk at the Kitchener-Waterloo Software Quality Association, Wednesday September 30. I’ll be giving a reprise of my STAR East keynote talk, What Haven’t You Noticed Lately? Building Awareness in Testers. (The title has been pinched from Mark Federman, who got it from Terence McKenna, who may have got it from Marshall McLuhan, but maybe not.) The following week, it’s STAR … Read more
In the course of trying to describe distinctions between testing and checking, a number of questions have come up: Do you want to change the language? Won’t saying “check” be confusing? Won’t this undermine our goal of industry-standard terminology? Won’t calling certain kinds of tests “checks” fly in the face of years of documentation and books? Isn’t this yet another case of you wanting testing to be done the same … Read more
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been very gratified by the response to the testing-vs.-checking distinction. Thanks to all who have grabbed on to the idea and to those who have questioned it. There’s a wonderful passage in Chapter 4 of Jerry Weinberg‘s Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing in which he breaks down the activities of a programmer engaged in testing activities—testing for discovery, discovering an unexpected … Read more
Several years ago, around the time I started teaching Rapid Software Testing, my co-author James Bach recorded a video to demonstrate rapid stress testing. In this case, the approach involved throwing an overwhelming amount of data at an application’s wizard, essentially getting the application to stress itself out. The video goes on for almost six minutes. About halfway through, James asks, “You might be asking why I don’t stop now. … Read more
This may just be my all-time favourite error message: Note that the promulgator of the message doesn’t identify itself (the caption bar is helpfully labelled “DLL”); that the program to be loaded isn’t identified; that the format isn’t identified; that what you might do to fix the problem isn’t identified… Oh, and by the way… a little detective work shows that it comes from Adobe Acrobat.
A test, for the purposes of this discussion, is at its core a process of exploration. Initially, our community described exploratory testing as “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning.” Later descriptions included “simultaneous test design, test execution, and learning, with an emphasis on learning“, “a parallel process of test design, test execution, test result interpretation, and learning, with an emphasis on learning”. At the Workshop on Heuristic and Exploratory … Read more
James Bach and I have a thing that we do called “transpection“. It’s not at all new (you do it, Socrates and his interlocutors did it in Plato’s dialogs, and people did it long before that and have done it ever since) but I think James’ word for it is new. Transpection is an exploratory conversation aimed (or chartered) towards discussing and refining a particular idea. Transpection is a way … Read more
Post-postscript: Think of this blog post with its feet up, enjoying a relaxing retirement after a strenuous career. Please read the new version first. In the years since the original post, I’ve further refined my take on the subject of testing and checking, mostly in collaboration with my colleague James Bach. Our current thinking on the topic appears on his blog, and I provide some followup here. We’ve also benefitted … Read more
I just spent $3,000 to get my nose fixed, and then I found out it was my tie that was crooked. —Steve Shrott There’s a piece of software development mythodology that suggests that it’s always more expensive to fix a problem late in the development process rather than early. Usually the ratios quoted are fantastic; a hundred to one, a thousand to one, ten thousand to one. Let’s put that … Read more
Some of this posting is based on a conversation from a little while back on TestRepublic.com. If anyone has a problem with “test estimation”, here’s a thought experiment: Your manager (your client) wants to give you an assignment: to evaluate someone’s English skills, with the intention of qualifying him to work with your team. So how long would it take you to figure out whether a Spanish-speaking person spoke English … Read more