thoughts from the test eye

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 […]

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. […]