I think quality criteria/factors/attributes/characteristics are extremely powerful. It helps you think in different ways, and makes it easy to get a broader coverage of your test ideas. See Software Quality Models and Philosophies for McCall, Boehm, FURPS, Dromey, ISO 9126 models, or CRUSSPIC STMPL for a version without focus on measurability. The granularity of this [...]
“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 [...]
I grew up in a small “town” in Värmland. Outside the village, most people live in isolated houses/farms on the countryside or in the woods. If you’d ask one of these persons what quality is, they would answer: dä ä väl att fôlk töcker att dä ä bra (guess it’s that people like it) This [...]
Now and then I read that testers don’t know enough about Usability, that there is a need for a Performance Testing expert, that a Security consultant should be called in, or that a master of the used technology would make Installation and Compatibility testing possible. This might be true in the general case, but there [...]
A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with someone that claimed that testers should (and could) report on quality. And especially he promoted the GQM-approach and how this could be designed to report the quality status. When I asked how that person defined quality, he pointed to ISO 9000:2000 which define quality as [...]
I use Jerry Weinberg’s definition of quality: “Quality is value to some person”; and I use Cem Kaner’s extension to the definition so that it becomes “Quality is value to some person (that matters)”… I.e. quality is inherently subjective. And there are a lot of persons that are affected by software that we produce… With this in [...]
When you come up with a new test idea, you are using your knowledge and experience, but there is also some sort of stimuli that triggers the idea. Something you see, hear, understand or think about. You seldom think in totally new ways, you rather combine things in a new way. These are my favorite [...]
Thare are many ways to look at the problem of testing software, and it is rarely wise to use only one; that’s why there are so many mnemonics, e.g. SFDPOT, CRUSSPIC STMPL, HICCUPPS, FCC CUTS VIDS (http://www.satisfice.com/tools/satisfice-tsm-4p.pdf, http://www.developsense.com/articles/2005-01-TestingWithoutAMap.pdf, http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2823) Here are some questions for your confusion: 1) What? a) The functionality, what the software does [...]