I was at Nordic Testing Days and had a great time meeting new and old friends. During my presentation about serendipity I showed two heuristics I wanted to share here as well. They both concern observing from different angles, to learn something new, and increase chances of serendipity. The Notepad Heuristic Years ago I worked […]
Asking questions is rightly regarded as important for testers. But I seldom here anything about what we should do with the answers. Not that I believe anyone would ask the question, then not listen to the result, but I think we take for granted that we will understand the answers, and that we can use […]
More than 3 years have passed since we published the first version of our Software Quality Characteristics. It is quite popular, and it is now translated to 8 languages by testing enthusiasts. But it’s about time to talk a bit more about how to use the list, where there are at least three typical scenarios: […]
I am always at the lookout for new testing exercises, since I teach a lot. Today I found a programming exercise at http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/ that I thought could be turned into something for testers. Since it doesn’t fit any of my current teaching schemes, I blog about it instead of putting it in the closet. Instructions: […]
In early 2013 I held a 7 week course on setting up a testing organisation that works well in an agile context. My intent was to explain my own approach and model of how testing is conducted, I wanted the students to see that they needed to create their own. For each part of the course […]
Our minds are fantastic, but can be biased and make dubious decisions. As I read Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, I thought about test strategy and found some interesting stuff, based on mistakes I have seen, and done. Answering An Easier Question “How could we possibly test everything important?” is a very difficult question. It […]
Introduction James Bach has written about Sweden and its testers like this: “In my world, ‘Swedish tester’ is becoming a stock phrase, like ‘French chef’ or ‘Swiss banker’ or ‘Antarean starship captain’ (You want your hyperdrive fixed right? Go see an Antarean). I’m not entirely sure why this is, but part of it is their […]
Planning a test lab takes a lot more time than you think. You prepare a lot of things and try to make the event great. Here are a few things that I considered … What applications/systems to test? how many would be enough? what type of system? how big or complex? are they fun to […]
* Take any product, or a part of it. * Choose one category of the quality characteristics. * Go through each sub-category and consider if it is relevant. * For these, write a quality objective anchored in the product, that is useful to many roles. * Design and execute tests that challenge these objectives. * […]
I guess some of you are writing, or thinking about writing, abstracts for EuroSTAR 2013, deadline is at 13 February. You should do this, not just because Alan said so. You should do it because you want to tell stories, enhance your own understanding of something that is important to you. This is my process […]