Storytelling has been rising for quite some years and it will soon boom for software testing. The reason is simple: people like stories. And if it is used as status reporting instead of lame numbers, it is a step in the right direction, to say the least. But when testing this idea theoretically, I find […]
James Bach and Michael Bolton has a classic collection of consistency oracles; HICCUPPS(F): History, Image, Comparable Products, Claims, User Expectations, Product, Purpose, Standards and Statutes, Familiarity It is a very good collection; not only helping you find out if something is a problem or not, but also the other way round: serving as testing inspiration. […]
During my first paternity leave I learned sourdough baking. During the second I couldn’t help writing an ambitious paper, or a small book, about people-oriented test design, about things beyond test design techniques, close to the exploratory testing tradition. It can be downloaded here. It contains collections of knowledge, and generalizations of my ten years […]
How do you find out what is important, in your specific situation? I think it is the essential problem for all activities with complexity. I think it is impossible to do really good software testing without the ability to dismiss things as not important, and dig deeper for matters that are important (I believe it’s […]
I know of some testers who are pointed out by others to be Bug Magnets; people recognized for their ability to somehow draw bugs to them. Bug Magnets can be found in many workplaces and I bet that you know of someone that falls under this description. I have been appointed a Bug Magnet by […]
In testing text books you can read that compatibility testing should be performed after the functionality testing and bug fixing is completed. I guess the reason is that you don’t want to mix these categories, but hey, what a waste of resources. My suggestion is to perform the compatibility testing at the same time as […]
I used to be a bit skeptic towards the word “heuristic”. It seemed needlessly advanced, and things are possible to explain in other words. But when I read Gigerenzer’s Gut Feelings about how to catch a flying ball, it all came together. For software testing, which can’t be complete, is dependent on many factors, with […]
I have completed a trilogy on the theme The Eye of a Skilled Software Tester edition 1: Lightning Talk, Danish Alliance, EuroSTAR 2010 edition 2: Article, The Testing Planet, March 2011 – Issue 4 edition 3: Presentation, Scandinavian Developer Conference, april 2011 Some things have changed over time; in the first two I didn’t focus […]
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, […]
I spend a lot of time testing new features for the next release. I actively try to not test the features in isolation, to not use the easiest data and environment. One example of this is that I often use “documents” that are more complex than necessary, that includes elements and strange things that aren’t […]