Silver bullets kill the vampires. The problem is not that there are no silver bullets. There are silver bullets—or if there aren’t any, you could make them fairly straightforwardly. The problems are Silver bullets are expensive, especially considering… There are no vampires. In our business, the problems that we have involve regular people, and there’s a long history that shows that bullets of any kind, whether in guns or PowerPoint … Read more
My colleague and friend Erik Petersen talks about bug clusters a lot. (I’ll get to discussing Black Swans in this space later, but I’m obliged to point out here that I disagree with Erik; I would argue that neither most bugs nor exploratory testing are black swans as he suggests.) I’ve been wanting to respond to the discussion for a while, and I think enough time has passed that I’m … Read more
I got some mail in the inbox recently from Qualtech, the organizers EuroSTAR 2008. The message was that Two Futures of Software Testing, one of my presentations, not only won the CapGemini Award for Innovation, but was also the highest-rated track session at the conference. That’s very gratifying; to both the conference participants and Qualtech, thank you for the honour. Qualtech also asked me to write a follow-up piece, which … Read more
Yesterday, Nestor Arellano from ITWorld Canada, an online publication, called me and sent an email, seeking comment on a press release about the Top 25 Programming Errors. I glanced at the list of errors that he had sent me, and it seemed to me that they had missed the most important programming error of all: failing to ask if the program does something useful or valuable, and failing to consider … Read more
At the Software Testing Club, Phil Kirkham asked a question headed “What Colour Tester Are You?” Another totally unscientific survey – how many readers of this site would consider themselves to be black box testers, white box testers or grey box testers ? Or if you are a test manager, what colour testing do the testers you are in charge of do? I whimsically replied, “I deny the existence of … Read more
The problem reported in this post has been, uh, fixed. Check the right-hand edge of the image.
If you want to understand what context-driven testing is all about, James Bach and Cem Kaner have recently collaborated on a statement of what it is, and a lengthy explication. It’s posted on Cem Kaner’s blog at http://www.satisfice.com/kaner. The posting covers the territory admirably, and I wholeheartedly agree with it. In particular, the statement emphasizes that adaptation to the needs of the project is the first step in the context-driven … Read more
Apparently. Please don’t misunderstand. I love the principles in the Agile Manifesto (including Robert Martin’s proposal for the fifth, “Craftsmanship over crap.”) I have great enthusiasm and respect for those who have advocated the role of testing in Agile projects. But in order to push these ideas forward, let’s make sure to test our stuff, to make sure that it doesn’t accidentally bring discredit to the ideas.
In response to this posting, Clive asks, “So in your opinion what should a test plan contain?” First, Clive, thank you for asking. Let’s consider first what we might mean by “plan”. The way James Bach and I talk about planning (and the way we teach it the Rapid Software Testing course) is that a plan is the sum or intersection of strategy and logistics. Strategy is the set of … Read more
Testing, in the quick definition that James Bach and I use, is questioning a product in order to evaluate it. One way of questioning the product is to ask ordinary questions about it, and then to operate it—supplying it with input of some kind, and operating it in some way. The product “answers” us by producing output or otherwise exhibiting behaviour, which we observe and evaluate. Another way of questioning … Read more