thoughts from the test eye

Even if most of the program is set, there is still a chance for you to talk at CAST 2011. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen is running the Emerging Topics session: If you would like to speak at CAST 2011, you still have the option of proposing a twenty-minute emerging topics session. (Emerging topics are anything […]

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. […]

Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite. Objects make the cost of this transaction tolerable. The danger occurs when the debt is not repaid. Every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt. Entire […]

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, […]

Here is neat story I told to Michael Bolton, Martin Jansson and Markus Gärtner when we were exploring the Metro in Copenhagen, during the coldest days the city had experienced since they started measure the temperature. I promised to blog about it… Let me begin with some background information. A couple of years ago I […]

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 […]