thoughts from the test eye

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 […]

Introduction In 2009 Michael Bolton had a talk at Agile 2009 from which he later on wrote about a distinction between testing and checking [1]. He has since then elaborated more in the area and digged deeper into it [2], and continue to do so [3]. By clarifying what we are doing at a certain […]

I see humility as a very good virtue. It is something I have failed miserably at, partly because it is easy to think something is bad just because there are many problems. I think it’s a common fallacy for many ambitious testers – you are last in line, maybe with lower status, you want to […]