Today, December 4 2007, I gave a presentation at EuroSTAR on “Why I Am Not (Yet) Certified“. James Bach was originally slated to give a different presentation with the same title, but I got the nod due to the untimely illness of James’ wife Lenore, which caused him to cancel his fall schedule (she’s much better now). Stuart Reid, the chair of the conference, strongly supports the notion of certifications … Read more
For those who read my blog but don’t read Grig Georghiu‘s, he notes an interview with Jerry Weinberg here. Thanks, Grig.
One of the problems in our business is that people are usually reluctant to talk about testing, even when it’s successful. In order to discuss testing, they may have to cop to problems in their product, or in their development work. Even if they’re very happy with the things that they’ve learned in the course and put into practice, they may have to acknowledge that earlier forms of testing were … Read more
I wrote a paper on pairwise testing in 2004 (and earlier), and now, in 2007, it’s time for an update. This post is an edited version of an appendix that I’ve recently added to that paper. First, there appears to be great confusion in the world between orthogonal arrays and pairwise testing. People use the terms interchangeably, but there is a clear and significant difference. I’m fairly proud of the … Read more
In an ongoing effort to spend even more time on the Web, I am adding a Technorati profile.
I’m going to be at the STARWest conference on the evening of Wednesday, October 24 through the morning of Friday, October 26. On Thursday morning, I’ll be presenting a talk on Emotions and Test Oracles, an expansion of a lightning talk that I gave at STAR East in May. Alas, my colleague James Bach is unable to be there. His subject, “How to Fake a Test Project” will be covered … Read more
Pradeep Soundararajan is a colleague of me and of James Bach. Pradeep would say he’s a student, but in this case the student has surpassed this teacher. Pradeep writes and tests and thinks with passion. In a recent blog post, he came up with this gem: “…it is not a test that finds a bug but it is a human that finds a bug and a test plays a role … Read more
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