When I wrote blog post The Complete List of Testing Inspiration, I didn’t think so much about many testing efforts being totally based on requirements and specifications. I took for granted that we know that requirements are incomplete and wrong, and that we should learn from many places. But when reading a good book such […]
There are situations when you have to choose to run a test or not. Some organizations quantifies properties like time, risk and get a prioritized list. Most probably just use their intuition, but if that’s not enough, or you want to explain and share the reasoning, you can try using a fast and frugal tree […]
Analogies are powerful when they help us understand something (they shouldn’t be used to argue.) And virtually any analogy can be good, you don’t know until after you have tried. So this exercise is to use an analogy from your daily life, compare it to testing in general, or to your current area of concern. […]
I believe there is too much focus on test coverage , there is even an axiom about the need of it. My reason is that no coverage model captures what is important. Cem Kaner lists 101 possible coverage models (Software Negligence and Testing Coverage), and none of them are super-good to me (my favorite is […]
The tool you’ve been waiting for! Function: When you push the pedal a random input will be sent to the machine, and thereby your application. By default, a sample of error-prone inputs are available (e.g. ASCII 30, double-click, Unicode, beep) The nifty thing is to be able to do this rapidly, On-Demand, in unexpected situations, […]
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. […]
Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design is an excellent book written by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg. It is primarily about requirements, but it is an excellent read for everyone involved in doing something that hasn’t been done before. As a software tester, it highlights, and helps, my own problems with understanding all important […]
Over the years, one has read quite some text about software testing. Some things have (from various sources and experiences) become clear for me, and I’m surprised when seeing articles/presentations that don’t acknowledge these insights. These “truths” are now and then implicitly disregarded: * Requirements don’t include all important information * Testing includes more than […]
EuroSTAR 2010 took place during the coldest Copenhagen November in 140 years. Being a program committee member it was a bit different, but not a lot; I met a lot of interesting people, spent too little time in the test lab, and listened to thought-worthy presentations (+ 11 Danish Alliance Lightning Talks.) The theme was […]
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 […]