thoughts from the test eye

At www.context-driven-testing.com you can read “Metrics that are not valid are dangerous.” I believe this is true, but I would rather prefer “Metrics are dangerous.” Uninterpreted measurements are not bad by themselves, but when value is added to them, they become metrics, and dangerous because they state specific things without considering a lot of other things, that […]

I stumbled on a Wikipedia-article about Adhocracy today, and it made me think about software development methods and software development organizations. Here are my thoughts… Heavy-weight development processes strive for being more and more formal and thereby (intentionally or unintentionally) turning the organization into a bureaucracy. Whereas light-weight development methods seem to strive for the […]

A project manager, that had no knowledge about testing whatsoever, asked me how he should go about testing? The question was vague since he did not know where to start. I wrote him a quick email listing a few things to consider: Create a list of all use cases. For each use case consider possible […]

How many should be employed? The quick answer is as many employees that are needed to call the team flexible, but it is not as simple a that. In order to get resources for the team, the team leader usually need to prove he/she needs resources at a certain time. Since the team tries to […]

Introduction The flexible testing team is one way of organising the testing team. It will not be the optimal in all situations and it might not fit all organisations or companies. It might not even be possible to fulfill this because of management issues. In any case, this is one way of looking at it […]

The variety of configurations (operating system, browser, language etc.) can look overwhelming; and it is impossible to test all possible configurations for Servers and Clients. On the other hand there are certain platforms that are more probable to uncover defects. This is just common sense, but I haven’t seen any terminology for handling this in […]

Actually not, but still it is a must if you have not tried it. Combine it with exploratory testing techniques and you will be effective and have a good time. One person explores and tests while the other documents, interacts and questions. Documenter: * Write down one-liner or at least short blocks of text for […]

Agile development methods are becoming a more popular way of producing software in contrast to traditional project processes. This has affected the testing profession in many ways, which has given us both benefits and new challenges. In a way, agile development methods can be seen as a reaction to a couple of traditional project risks. […]

I would like to remind you all about the Sysinternals tool site, which now reside on Microsoft Technet, and is called Windows Sysinternals. http://technet.microsoft.com/sv-se/sysinternals/default(en-us).aspx Old favourites like RegMon and FileMon can be found here; so also the new gems PsTools, Process Explorer and Strings. Great tools for testers on Windows platforms!

I seldom see discussion about our status reports. I refer to the reports that we write for the release, iteration, build and so on. There are several templates and standards out on the internet but I have not read any ground breaking updates in that area for a long time. Many might see the status […]