Exploratory Testing is not as widely used as it could be, because management doesn’t want it. Stated reasons for this could be unaccountable, unstructured, sloppy, non-scientific etc, reasons that can be refuted by communication. But I think the real reason is something Exploratory Testing can’t have: a controlled process. Management/Companies want to have a plan […]
It is good to strive for better requirements by critical analysis (and looking for what’s missing), but there is a danger in complaining about untestable requirements. If those vague requirements are changed (made too specific) or removed, the words in the requirements document have less meaning, and less chance of guiding towards great software. And […]
In many years I have loved most of what is written by the people behind the context-driven school of testing. But I have also felt that there is something that isn’t a perfect match. For a time I thought it was because I saw a few different tries to push people to different schools – […]
As a Swede, the winter Olympics are fun to watch. Most sports aren’t spread across the globe, so we have chances for medals. One of the most exciting events are the Biathlon, and perhaps it was a reaction to disappointing results for the Swedish ladies, but I got really upset at the software: The numbers […]
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 […]
Analogies are helpful, not because they come with truths, but because they can help you highlight and think in different ways about the phenomena you are comparing with. I think you can pick any subject you know a lot about, and after some thinking, interesting things will emerge. The important moments If two chess players […]
This is an idea you see and hear now and then. It comes in different shapes, ranging from testers needing to have an independent manager, to testers being best if physically separated from developers, or even outsourced, or crowdsourced. Cem Kaner writes in The Ongoing Revolution in Software Testing that this notion primarily is a […]
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 […]
I have been thinking about qualitative research lately, and wondered what the question(s) would look like if testing was seen as a research project. The testing effort has many positive effects, but one common and important is to provide information about the product, so a good release decision can be made. We cannot prove that […]
For quite some time I have felt that the classic test design techniques don’t add up to the needs of software testing that tries to find most of the important information. At EuroSTAR 2009 it dawned on me that it is time to describe the method that I, and many, many others, have been using […]