thoughts from the test eye

This was originally a response to Rikard’s post “Multi-Dimensional Software Testing”, but here I have developed my thoughts a bit. As I see it, there are more or less obvious stakeholders and stakeholders that might be more or less hidden. A “customer” might be such an obvious stakeholder. It might then just be a matter […]

The indispensible worker is the one who always saves the day by touching the program by giving some magic input in order for it to work. He will quickly get the work done and make the customer happy. Upper management will see him as the perfect employee, but many co-workers will think differently. In the […]

Thare are many ways to look at the problem of testing software, and it is rarely wise to use only one; that’s why there are so many mnemonics, e.g. SFDPOT, CRUSSPIC STMPL, HICCUPPS, FCC CUTS VIDS (http://www.satisfice.com/tools/htsm.pdf, http://www.developsense.com/articles/2005-01-TestingWithoutAMap.pdf, http://www.testingreflections.com/node/view/2823) Here are some questions for your confusion: 1) What? a) The functionality, what the software does […]

At my former company we had a vision of removing/fixing all unhandled exceptions that we found (and that we thought a customer might encounter). After some discussions we decided that the unhandled exceptions should be treated in the same way as we had treated severe errors on previous platforms. I.e. Crashes in C++; NullPointerExceptions in […]

I’ve recently become addicted to baking bread. I don’t know why, but it has the same kind of magic as music and software testing; so I’ll try to make some analogies. Results – The best bread results come when there is long fermentation time, just as when a tester can spend a long time with […]

This article is about combining the role of the tester with other roles. These are observations based on my own experiences. I’ve not studied any books or other articles about this. I assume that each role has its own mind set, focus and goals. I will try to identify the agendas and possible mind sets […]

I’ve just gone through a three day course in Rapid Software Testing (RST) run by James Bach. This is the first time I’ve seen him in person. I’ve previously seen his responses and discussion from the yahoo group software-testing. I’ve seen the presentation on RST by Michael Bolton and I think either of them would […]

I spent one day at Øredev 2008 (http://www.oredev.org) since they invited me to give the Where Testing Creativity Grows (http://www.thetesteye.com/papers/where_testing_creativity_grows.doc) presentation. I arrived ten minutes after the start of James Bach’s keynote The Renaissance Thinker, where he argued that 1972 (Chapel Hill) ruined good software testing. People started focusing too much on templates, processes, best […]

This years EuroSTAR took place in den Haag, a city that had quite some rain, but also beautiful autumn leaves, and big churches. The theme of the conference was “The Future of Software Testing”, and a recurring image was a traffic sign informing that the future is next turn to the right. I always thought […]

The short answer goes: No, of course you can’t! Once upon a time, I got the possibility to read a test strategy document written by a business colleague of mine. The strategy was a 47 pages document that tried to cover all aspects of testing that I guess would apply to all projects; because in […]