thoughts from the test eye

The Tester’s Pocketbook by Paul Gerrard is not a great book, but it is very good. It covers fundamentals of software testing, and contains a ton of good ideas that will help you in your testing effort. I also like it because it is one of few books on testing theory that focus on the […]

If you want to seriously improve your bug reporting skills, read up, or take, the BBST Bug Advocacy course. If you want to start by improving bug report title/subject/summary; read Lessons Learned in Software Testing, no, 83, or this blog post. Many people will only read the title, so it is important to make it […]

While sifting and sorting the ISTQB Glossary 2.1 I finally found a couple of terms which definitions were both correct and useful: 1. deliverable – Any (work) product that must be delivered to someone other than the (work) product’s author. Good, because it puts focus on the fact that you are creating the deliverable so it […]

A while ago I was going to a customer meeting to hold a workshop in SBTM, showing that testing could be managed in a different way. I feel fairly experienced in the way I work as a tester, but at a parking lot my humility and confidence turned over. I was standing next in line […]

Download! It is often stated, with right, that you should use many, different information sources in order to come up with good test ideas. Rob Sabourin uses 10 categories, HICCUPPS(F) can be used not only as oracles, and Cem Kaner has many examples in various presentations and tutorials. We decided to make our own list […]

Henrik Emilsson has convinced me that skilled software testing is based on invisible mental models that help us see what can be tested. If we can make these visible, we can sharpen our skills, and also teach testing more effectively. Here follows a simple example I used in class, that shows that by switching between […]

Here are some small, free, nifty tools I use now and then: FreeMind – to model and communicate WinMerge – to diff or merge files or folders Process Hacker – to monitor resource usage Process Monitor – to monitor registry and disk activities InCtrl5 – for installation testing (what happended to Install Analyzer??) Fiddler/Wireshark – to see […]

Sometimes when I read status reports or hear project managers talk about testing, I hear that “testing is blocked”. What do they mean by that? When I delve deeper in what they are talking about I sometimes see that the progress on workpackages for the testing team or testers in a team have been combined with […]

I have been using the Scripted – Exploratory Testing Continuum (For one source of this, see page 56 in http://www.ryber.se/wp-content/EssentialTestDesign.pdf ) in classes to explain how scripted testing and exploratory testing intertwines; and to explain that most of our testing is somewhere in the middle of the continuum. But I have also had some issues with this […]

When I explain pair testing I usually say that you pair up two persons. One drives the testing while the other documents, comes with suggestions and asks for clarifications. In this context, if we consider the use of testing and checking. What if the person driving focus on testing (that is usually the case) and the […]