Terminology

Effective Technical Investigators

Testing is a skilled technical investigation and competent testers are the investigators. This essay is about re-introducing the concept of software testers as skilled technical investigators.

What Is Exploratory Testing?

Exploratory testing was first coined by Cem Kaner who defined it as a style of software testing that emphasizes the personal freedom and responsibility of the individual tester to continually optimize the value of her work by treating test-related learning, test design, test execution, and test result interpretation as mutually

What are Quicktests and when are they used?

What are Quicktests? Tests that don’t cost much to design, are based on some estimated idea for how the system could fail (risk-based) and don’t take much prior knowledge in order to apply are often called quicktests (sometimes stylized as quick tests or even called attacks). When are

How Do I Test This?

Occasionally I’ll be looking at a bug report / kanban card / story, trying to understand it and its implications. Unable to make sense of what I’m reading, I’ll find the originator and ask them “how do I test this”? The problem is I don’t mean this literally;

Trends in Testing Terminology

There are lots of things to consider when trying to recruit or develop software testers especially industry trends, both within the testing community and in the larger software engineering community. In a small community like ours those trends might include development practices, tools, techniques and terminology (among others). As I

The idea of a Professional Tester

As rough as traveling can be, one benefit is dedicated time to catch up on reading. I finally got around to a post from Uncle Bob on “Sapient Testing: The “Professionalism” meme” and it captured something I’ve been thinking about for a some time: the label of professional(ism)

Humans and Machines: Getting The Model Wrong

It seems like one of the more prominent and perpetual debates within the software testing community is the delineation between what the computer and human can and should do. Stated another way, this question becomes “what parts of testing fall to the human to design, run and evaluate and what

The Domain Testing Workbook is available

Cem Kaner, Sowmya Padmanabhan and Doug Hoffman have a new book called The Domain Testing Workbook. I’d highly recommend picking up a copy or at least adding it to your reading list! This book is not just a deep dive into one test technique but it represents a collective

I'm a Bug Advocate

I do advocate for bugs to be fixed but the title comes from passing the Association for Software Testing‘s (AST) Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Bug Advocacy course. The class officially ended in mid-July and it marks the third and final BBST class for me. Together Foundations, Bug Advocacy

Why take a Black Box Software Testing course?

I was recently telling a friend about the BBST Bug Advocacy course I was working on and he asked why I was taking a black box testing course. I think what he meant was why would I take a course on black box testing as opposed to glass box (or

First principle reasoning

When I was young I remember wanting to be an awesome football player like Joe Montana, or an FBI agent working on the X-Files like Fox Mulder. These days I want to have the skills to identify and solve problems like Elon Musk. Musk is an interesting person. He’s

Low and High Intensity Learning

Paul Graham in his essay Wealth says startups are a way of compressing a whole working life into a few years. You work at a very high intensity for a short period of time (say four years) instead of the normal low intensity for a long period of time (say

I'm a Black Box Software Tester

More accurately I should say I’ve passed the Association for Software Testing‘s Black Box Software Testing Foundations class.Here’s the proof: What does this mean? It means the instructors think I understood enough of the material to pass me based on the work I did throughout the

Feedback from a Developer (without knowing it)

Recently someone asked one of my developers if we created formal test plans. Since the conversation was in an email, my developer cc’d me on it and responded saying he wasn’t sure but he had seen me create test cases in our bug tracker, SpiraTeam. He wasn’t

1993 World Book definitions for Quality and Testing

According to the 1993 “The World Book Dictionary” the definition for Quality Control is “[T]he inspection of manufactured products from the raw materials that go into them to their finished form to insure that they meet the standards of quality set by the manufacturer.” (pg. 1703.) That same dictionary

The Role of Testing by James Bach

The following is a summary of the essay The Role of Testing by James Bach from the book Amplifying Your Effectiveness: Collected Essays. The essay goes like this: After not liking his time as a developer James thought being a testing manager would provide more wiggle room, since testing is

Review: Exploratory Software Testing - Tips, tricks, tours and techniques to guide test design

Some of the first testing books I read were from James Whittaker’s How to Break Software series. Those books, like this one, are laid out in a practical manner with each chapter focused on a specific attack or approach making them easy to read, reference and apply. Perfect for

James Bach's Open Lecture on Software Testing

I got to talk to James Bach last week at StarWest 2011 in Anaheim. I joined his Critical Thinking class for its final 2 hours on Tuesday after walking out on my boring afternoon half-day tutorial on Open Source tools. I was surprised when I was able to catch up