Software testing is difficult because there are so many possibilities; not only all functions and their interactions and attributes, but also possbible users’ data, needs, environments and feelings. Good software testing need to deliberately sample, and understand what is important. This understanding that evolves over time give testers an intuition about which tests to run, […]
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 […]
Many of you have played roleplaying games/storytelling games or at least heard of them. In those games you have a gamemaster/storyteller, who arranges scenes or scenarios that the players act in. He does not control what each player does nor how he/she should interact with others. Each player usually plays a role/character that has a […]
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. […]
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. […]
Monday Henrik started his journey by car from Karlstad and went down to Gothenburg to join with Martin. Both of us were going to take the train down to Copenhagen. Not surprisingly there were delays and the train was cancelled… Instead we headed back to Martin’s house and loaded Henrik’s car and took off. After […]
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 […]
It is a natural instinct for a tester to break down product information to elements that can be used in testing. It can be elaborations on a requirement, or insights from talking to a customer, or feature slogans from a web site et.al. Michael Bolton (and James Bach) calls this factoring – “Factoring is the […]
I’m re-reading deBono’s excellent Lateral Thinking. Here is a Generate Alternatives exercise for software testers; try to think of as many different alternatives as possible. There is no right answer, the focus is to train yourself in re-structuring information. And at the same time come up with many different ideas that might generate fruitful thoughts. […]
When testing software, the very best inspiration and reality check comes from the software itself. It helps you test beyond requirements, and investigate what the software really is capable, and incapable, of. These are my best practices for exploratory testing. 1. understand what’s important – we can’t test everything, and we can’t find all bugs. […]