One heavyweight way of testing charisma is to use dozens of potential users on dozens of alternative product solutions/prototypes. For lightweight charisma testing, it is often fast and fruitful with an awareness of charisma violations. This method requires an understanding of the unique charisma for your product. Testers probably won’t be in charge of developing […]
I have been doing and teaching quite a lot of scenario testing lately. I have been surprised by the ease and speed, and ability to find important problems, (also giving an embryo to a compelling bug report.) Maybe it can be useful for you as well, probably as a complementary technique, or as a powerful […]
As everyone else, I fell into testing by chance. I wanted to work as a developer, and saw testing as a stepping stone (this quickly changed, though.) My first day I tested a Service Pack of a big, localized product. An experienced tester guided me at the start, and I can still remember the conversation. […]
In Julian Harty’s keynote Open Sourcing Testing at Let’s Test conference, RedNotebook (together with Sikuli and CiviCRM) was suggested as an open source project where ambitious testers could collaborate and share their testing efforts and results. I have done a small start by contacting the RedNotebook team (they are interested in bugs and enhancements, especially in the […]
You can learn a lot by testing something very different from your normal job. I’d love to professionally test a suggested law, or a chainsaw. For now, I give you an opportunity to test a bread recipe, in English or Swedish. FAVORITE SOURDOUGH BREAD FAVORITBRÖDET It should be possible to bake from it if you […]
If performance is crucial for product success, you probably need pretty advanced tools to measure various aspects of your product, to find all bottlenecks and time thiefs. For all other software, performance is just very important, and you might get by with lightweight test methods. You may, or may not have quantified performance requirements, but […]
The Tester’s Pocketbook by Paul Gerrard is not a great book, but it is very good. It covers fundamentals of software testing, and contains a ton of good ideas that will help you in your testing effort. I also like it because it is one of few books on testing theory that focus on the […]
If you want to seriously improve your bug reporting skills, read up, or take, the BBST Bug Advocacy course. If you want to start by improving bug report title/subject/summary; read Lessons Learned in Software Testing, no, 83, or this blog post. Many people will only read the title, so it is important to make it […]
While sifting and sorting the ISTQB Glossary 2.1 I finally found a couple of terms which definitions were both correct and useful: 1. deliverable – Any (work) product that must be delivered to someone other than the (work) product’s author. Good, because it puts focus on the fact that you are creating the deliverable so it […]
Henrik Emilsson has convinced me that skilled software testing is based on invisible mental models that help us see what can be tested. If we can make these visible, we can sharpen our skills, and also teach testing more effectively. Here follows a simple example I used in class, that shows that by switching between […]