When I wrote blog post The Complete List of Testing Inspiration, I didn’t think so much about many testing efforts being totally based on requirements and specifications. I took for granted that we know that requirements are incomplete and wrong, and that we should learn from many places. But when reading a good book such […]
Exploring Requirements: Quality Before Design is an excellent book written by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg. It is primarily about requirements, but it is an excellent read for everyone involved in doing something that hasn’t been done before. As a software tester, it highlights, and helps, my own problems with understanding all important […]
It is good to strive for better requirements by critical analysis (and looking for what’s missing), but there is a danger in complaining about untestable requirements. If those vague requirements are changed (made too specific) or removed, the words in the requirements document have less meaning, and less chance of guiding towards great software. And […]
When preparing for EuroSTAR 2009 presentation I drew a picture to try to explain that you need to test a lot more than the requirements, but we don’t have to (and can’t) test everything and the qualitative dilemma is to look for and find the important bugs in the product. Per K. instantly commented that […]
Statements in specifications try to clarify and are inevitably an interpretation of what the author thinks need to be more specific. I.e., they try to be a more specific model than what existed before the spec. And “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful” (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box). Every specification you encounter is persons’ interpretations, and […]
I like to use categorizations to structure my understanding of a subject; and after the simplifications are made and I think I understand it well; the structures can be ripped apart, and you get a bit less confused by the complexity of reality. There are many forms of requirements, these are some a tester should […]