A correspondent on LinkedIn asked recently, “What are the useful metrics for software quality?” Here’s my answer (lightly edited for the blog). Update, September 20: Whoops! Thanks to Anonymous, I notice that I’ve mistranscribed the original question, which was “What are the useful metrics for code quality?” Measurement is “the empirical, objective assignment of numbers, according to a rule derived from a model or theory, to attributes of objects or … Read more
Over and over, I’ve said that testing is better on many levels when it’s investigative, rather than merely confirmatory. Today I was browsing the Web. A question that someone had asked me about SwissAir led me to Wikipedia; from there I jumped to the article on Air Canada. I’m also a fan of Stan Rogers’ music, and so I looked into the incident in which he died—a fire that started … Read more
A correspondent on the Agile Testing mailing list asked recently Shall automated acceptance tests use the GUI the app provides? My reply sat in my drafts folder for a while, and I just found it. Too late for the conversation, really, so I’ll post it here. My thought, as usual, is that automated acceptance tests checks should or should not use the GUI depending on the questions you want to … Read more
I just recently added eight more of my Test Connection columns from Better Software magazine. Enjoy!
“No user would ever do that!”“No user would ever try that!”“No user would ever need that feature!”“That’s a cool idea, but no user would ever want it.” When developers say, “No user would ever do that,” what they really mean is “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose. In the Rapid Software Testing course, James and I have been encouraging testers to … Read more
This posting is a slightly modified version of an exchange on the software testing mailing list. It also formed the basis for an Better Software column called “McLuhan for Testers“. One of the Kindly Contributors to the software-testing mailing list, José Alejandro Betancur, writes: [quote] I have been creating the Test Department at a developer company (www.intergrupo.com) for about 1 1/2 year. But I’m facing a problem right now, and … Read more
I gave a lightning talk at STAR East on emotions and oracles. Oracles are the principles or mechanisms by which we recognize a problem. Jerry Weinberg has written a lot about the significance of emotions in our work, but I’m aware of few other people who address the matter so directly in the software business. Over the last little while, I’ve begun to find that there’s an emotional component to … Read more
A discussion started recently in comp.software.testing about industry best practice: When creating a complicated web based application from scratch, how many testers per developer would be considered a best practice? I have heard 1.5 testers for every developer. What are your thoughts on this? My (lightly-edited for this blog) response was… If you want to find all the bugs, 100 testers per programmer would be much better than 1.5 testers … Read more
There’s a perception (mine) that one of the biggest questions in testing is “did this test pass or fail?” However, that big question pales in significance to a much more important question, in my view: Is there a problem here? And that is what this lovely little conversation between James Bach and Mike Kelly is all about.
Again, in the unlikely event that you read my blog before you read James‘ blog. One of James’ correspondents, who sometimes goes by the name “Ben Simo”, is a very sharp fellow, as evinced by some of his posts on the software-testing mailing list. In response to our conversation about scripted test procedures, Ben asked a question that I think is important. How do we teach script writers to lock … Read more