As an exercise, try these generic test ideas on any product, for instance a recent upload to sourceforge.net. Then come up with a better test idea, and write as a comment. Also suggest one to remove; I have decided they must be seventeen (a Tranströmer homage) * Try to do what it is supposed to [...]
The big drawback and big advantage with reliability testing is that it is easiest and most effective to perform together with other testing. A separate automated reliability regression test suite could cost an awful lot to implement, but reliability in your spine when performing any type of manual test, together with deviations, is cheap, interesting, [...]
When I read about the “classic” test design techniques, I don’t recognize the way I come up with test ideas. Sure, the implicit equivalence partitioning is used pretty often, and I get happy the few times a state model is appropriate, but the testing I perform seldom has the unit/component focus that these techniques have. [...]
It is very difficult to describe the process of synthesizing test ideas. It involves a multitude of information sources, a sense of what’s important, and a dose of creativity to come up with ingenious test ideas, and effective ways to execute them. The easiest way is to take the requirements document, re-phrase each item, and [...]
It was Stockholm again this year. Good to not have to travel far, but since you are travelling I wouldn’t object to something more exotic, and warmer. Next year it is Copenhagen, again. I had a full-packed program with 4 days of tutorials, workshops, tracks, short talks, test-labbing, conversations, so in total it is quite [...]
In order to become a successful inquisitive tester, there are a couple of things you can do to improve your skills beyond the more common quest to “question a product”. One important thing is to question the tests themselves. ——————– Have you ever run tests and wondered if they were really necessary, perhaps knowing that the tests [...]
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 [...]
At EuroSTAR 2009 I will present “More and Better Test Ideas“; the main idea being that testers could generate many different types of test ideas, and communicate them in a condensed one-liner format. If you have great tips on how to come up with really good test ideas, or want to review the paper I’m [...]
Sometimes it is said that each test case must have an expected result, or even worse, that each step of a test case must have an expected result. This is the extreme of scripted testing that I dislike for two reasons: * It takes a lot of time to write and follow detailed test cases; [...]