thoughts from the test eye

Now and then you hear that developers should implement better support for testability, so testers can work more efficient. This is all well, but what about the opposite; how can testers make developers go faster? System testers have system (and a lot of other) knowledge, and we can see if the product turned out really […]

I have entered EuroSTAR’s VideoSTAR competition for 2011, main reason might be that I want more people to see the excellent introduction movie Mårten and Henrik made for me a couple of years ago. My title is “Set All Testers Free!”, and I can’t say I have the details set for a talk, but it […]

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 […]

There are some discussions about current certification schemes, but there is not so much attacks and defense of the actual content. This is from ISTQB Glossary 2.1: black box test design technique: Procedure to derive and/or select test cases based on an analysis of the specification, either functional or non-functional, of a component or system […]

If you haven’t done it before, have a look at the Software Quality Characteristics that we published last year: TheTestEye – Software Quality Characteristics You can probably imagine ways of testing for all of these quality characteristics yourself, and you might even come up with good oracles that can assist you in the interpretation of the […]

In a recent discussion with Henrik Andersson on Twitter regarding some consultancies being or claiming to be best at testing. Here is the initial conversation: Henrik: Dear consultant companies why are you calling yourself consultant when all you talk about are recourses and invoiced hours. Shame on you! Henrik: Many “consultant” companies claim to be […]

We all test as children; we are curious and want to find things out, before we are one year old we want to break things, and after three we ask “What If” questions. My first ambitious testing journey came many years later. Still a naive teenager, I started studying Philosophy at the university. It was […]

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, […]

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 […]