‘Ideas’ Archive

Status of Software Testing Professionals Rikard Edgren No Comments

Many testers feel underrated; they don’t think they get the respect they deserve. There are more reasons for this than suggested solutions. One proposed solution is to define the profession more thoroughly, to get standards and certifications that can guarantee more than the bare minimum of test quality. I am confident this isn’t the “good” […]

Ignoratio elenchi Henrik Emilsson 6 Comments

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could come up with a Quality Value for our products?”  said a colleague of mine. “Yes! That would be super!” me and a couple of colleagues answered. We had a lot of categories and data in our bug system; and perhaps most important was that we had a good data […]

Book review: The Black Swan Torbjörn Ryber 4 Comments

The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Eyafjallajukull started to spew out tons of ashes in the sky. Air Traffic over Europe was severely hindered and stopped totally for a number of days. This is a perfect example of a Black Swan Event. What we call here a Black […]

just a few questions… Rikard Edgren 2 Comments

I stopped myself in the hallway just to ask a few quick questions: Why do you like software testing? – That’s not a short question! But it involves a lot of creativity, subjectivity, serendipity, critical and holistic thinking. What’s your motivation for writing on a blog? – I don’t know, I just can’t stop myself. […]

The List Is Not Enough Rikard Edgren 5 Comments

If you just do what’s on the list of things to do, I think you can accomplish decent things, but nothing great. I don’t dare saying this is a general truth for everybody creating something new, so let’s focus on software development. There are many management models, and many of them boils down to something […]

What makes you stay as a tester? Martin Jansson 3 Comments

I believe that as a tester you do not value the same things as someone with a different role in the organisation. Each individual most certainly value different things, but I think there are some specific traits of the organisation that triggers a tester to stay or seek new employments. As a test consultant you […]

Testing Clichés Part IV – We can’t find all (important) bugs Rikard Edgren 4 Comments

It’s a truth that we can’t find all bugs, but is it really a truth that we can’t find all important bugs? And it’s a cliche when used as answer to the (sincere) “why didn’t you find that bug?” question. Testers are paid to find important information about what they are testing, and included are […]

Sampling & Serendipity Rikard Edgren 3 Comments

“Testing can’t be complete” might be the only statement all testers would agree upon. This means that we only will run a few of all possible tests, and this is in many fields called sampling. There isn’t too much said about qualitative sampling in software testing, so let’s look at what Grounded Theory says about […]

Is your testing saturated? Rikard Edgren 7 Comments

There are many names for software testing strategies/activities/ approaches/processes; they can be risk-based, coverage-focused, exploratory, requirements-based, Super-TPI, TMM 5 et.al. The names generally come from how the testing is performed or initiated, so I thought we should look at it from another angle, from the end of testing, from the results that we might know […]

Exploratory Testing is not a test technique Henrik Emilsson 7 Comments

Well, to many people this is nothing new. But still, there are a lot of testers, and indeed test leads, that still think that Exploratory Testing is a technique that can be used in testing. To some extent, it has to do with that both Cem Kaner and James Bach have used this term amongst […]