George Dinwiddie told me a wonderful story at the AYE Conference last night. He was working with a group of developers at a company with several development groups. He coached them in implementing test-driven development and unit testing, and he emphasized to the programmers the importance of delivering well-tested code to the system testers. The results were impressive. The testers found dramatically fewer problems than usual—only one bug that was … Read more

A while back, I wrote a post on breaking code, in which I suggested that testers don’t add value to a project; they merely defend the value that’s there. This isn’t a general systems law, but any general utterance should have a couple of specific exceptions or alternative views. So, with the passage of time, here are a couple. First, a while ago, I was chatting with James Bach, and … Read more

I heard two wonderful things on the CBC today, both of which relate to this business of software development. One was on the radio, on an arts magazine called Q, hosted by the urbane Jian Ghomeshi. He was interviewing the winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Junot Diaz. At one point, Diaz said something close to this: Appearances are not what matters…what’s the reality? As an artist, I’m … Read more

While reading Tim Harford’s excellent book on economics, The Logic of Life, I found this quote from Adam Smith: “The man whose whole life is spent on performing a few simple operations … has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a … Read more

Shrini Kulkarni reports on a conversation that he had with Rex Black. Shrini apparently offered a definition of testing, developed by James Bach, that we use in our Rapid Software Testing course: testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it. Rex didn’t agree with this definition. “Questioning a lifeless thing like software is bizarre. I cannot question my dog,” said Rex. Despite the fact that a statement is … Read more

(This post from the past was a stepping stone on the way to our current thinking about exploratory testing which is that it’s… testing. This post remains here as a historical artifact.) One of the highlights of CAST 2008 was Cem Kaner‘s talk “The Value of Checklists and the Danger of Scripts: What Legal Training Suggests for Testers.”A big part of the talk was the contrast between exploratory and scripted … Read more

After a long summer of travelling, cottaging, teaching, learning, speaking, listening, and reading, it’s back to the blogosphere. There’s much, much more to come—but first, an announcement. There will be a rare open-to-the public presentation of Rapid Software Testing in Minneapolis, MN, sponsored by (and to the benefit of) the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association. The course will be presented October 7 through 9, 2008. I’ll also be speaking at … Read more

One of the hallmarks of the Conference for the Association for Software Testing is adaptability. Each track session and keynote is followed by a facilitated discussion, and if there’s energy to continue to the discussion when the official time is up, we go into overtime and find a place for the conversation to continue. This is unlike pretty much any conference that I’ve ever been to (although to its credit, … Read more

Karen Johnson just posted a blog entry on testing search algorithms. I’m soon going to write an article on accidental test coverage. The intersection of these two topics can be found here, based on a search I recently did in the frequently asked questions list on an airline Web site. Search Results for “power for laptops” 1. Can I use my laptop during my flight? 2. Where can I locate … Read more