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 […]
When preparing for EuroSTAR 2009 presentation I drew a picture to try to explain that you need to test a lot more than the requirements, but we don’t have to (and can’t) test everything and the qualitative dilemma is to look for and find the important bugs in the product. Per K. instantly commented that […]
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 […]
Exploratory Testing in its purest form is an approach that focus on learning, evolution and freedom. Cem Kaner’s definition is to the point: “Exploratory software testing is a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the value of her work by treating test-related learning, […]
I believe that it is impossible to objectively capture important things about a software tester’s productivity. On the other hand I don’t believe there is a big difference between feeling productive and being productive. I feel productive when I * test a feature that is good, but not perfect * review specifications * do pair […]
I like to use categorizations to structure my understanding of a subject; and after the simplifications are made and I think I understand it well; the structures can be ripped apart, and you get a bit less confused by the complexity of reality. There are many forms of requirements, these are some a tester should […]