thoughts from the test eye

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 […]

Status reporting of testing activities is extremely project-dependent. The needs of when and how and what will differ every time. Maybe that’s why there’s so little good writing about status communication; you have to make it up every time. Templates are out of the question, and I believe examples will mislead you as well. You’re […]

Generic test report:  DateTime ID Author Time for writing report Time maintaining scripts for generating report Application Under Test Areas tested For each area: Blockers Testers Tester mood Tests planned Tests executed Tests passed Tests failed Tests remaining (untested+fail) Bugs found, per priority Old bugs status (priority, severity, tester, assignee, days active) Bug resolution aggregation […]

– I saw you tested “42”. How come you didn’t try “43”? – That’s obvious. It would be the same. No need to test something that would give the same result. – OK, so I guess you are familiar with equivalence partitioning? – Beg your pardon? It is quite often said that testers don’t know […]

I spent this weekend in nice, dark, foggy Ringsjöstrand for the third Swedish Workshop on Exploratory Testing. Johan Jonasson, Ola Hyltén, Anders Claesson, Oscar Cosmo, Petter Mattsson, Rikard Edgren, Henrik Andersson, Robert Bergqvist, Maria Kedemo, Sigge Birgisson, Simon Morley. The format is LAWST-style, which means a presentation is followed by a facilitated discussion, that goes […]

Last week I took the Rapid Test Management (RTM) class in Gothenburg with James Bach. As always, he is such an inspiration and really makes you engage and think. Thanks for that James! In one part of the class we were factoring an application: Factoring: Dimensions of Interest Factoring is the process of analyzing an […]

I spent two days in Malmö attending a developer conference with a fantastic test track (put together by Sigge Birgisson.) I did a presentation on Curing Our Binary Disease (slides, abstract), which was much better received than I hoped for (I thought it was a binary love/hate talk) Good questions and talk about being inside […]

A year has passed since we released version 1.0 of our quality model without metrics. It is time for a new version, with additions and corrections we have learned over the year (and a Swedish translation!) 1.1 English 1.1 Swedish 1.0 English Feedback is always welcome! /Rikard, Henrik, Martin

As an exercise, try these generic test ideas on any product, for instance a recent upload to sourceforge.net. Then come up with a better test idea, and write as a comment. Also suggest one to remove; I have decided they must be seventeen (a Tranströmer homage) * Try to do what it is supposed to […]