Test Design

Exploratory Testing FAQs

I’ve come across a number of Frequently Asked Questions about Exploratory Testing and I’ve got what I hope are pretty good answers. Exploratory Testing FAQs Frequently Asked Questions about exploratory testing. Got a quick question? Get a quick answer. Yes, there are many examples where people have used

Exploratory Testing Charters

An exploratory testing charter is a mission statement for your testing. It helps provide structure and guidance so that you can focus your work and record what you find in a constructive way. How to Write an Exploratory Charter My favorite way to structure exploratory testing charters is to base

Good Tests vs Bad Tests and why you shouldn't repeat them

A little rant on this concept of Good Tests vs Bad Tests and whether a good test (case) is a repeatable one.

Regression testing isn’t only about repetition

Often when I’m chatting with someone about their regression testing strategy there is an assumption regression is all about repeating the same tests. This is a bit problematic because it ignores an important aspect which testers tend to be good at: focusing on risk. A better way to think

BBST Domain Testing – An Experience Report

In late January of 2014, after the Workshop on Teaching Software Testing (WTST) at Florida Institute of Technology, Dr. Cem Kaner and Dr. Rebecca Fiedler put together a 5-day pilot course to beta test a new Black Box Software Testing (BBST) course called Domain Testing. I was one of ten

How To Run Your Selenium Tests with Headless Chrome

The Problem If you want to run your tests headlessly on a Continuous Integration (CI) server you’ll quickly realize that you can’t with an out-of-the-box setup since there is no display output for the browser to launch in. You could use a third party library like Xvfb (tip

Good and Bad UI Test Automation explained - Inspired by Richard Bradshaw's Tweets

Generally speaking there’s a scary trend with the influx of people interested in test automation where (seemingly) everyone wants to automate at the UI level. For example the phrase “Test automation” seems to be synonymous with UI automation which seems to mean using Selenium. To be fair there are

Opting out of A/B Tests while Running your Automated Tests

At Laurel & Wolf, we extensively introduce & test new features as part of A/B or split testing. Basically we can split traffic coming to a particular page into different groups and then show those groups different variations of a page or object to see if those changes lead

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

Selecting a few Platform Configuration Tests

I’ve been developing a GUI acceptance test suite to increase the speed of specific types of feedback about our software releases. In addition to my local environment I’ve been using Sauce Labs to extend our platform coverage (mostly by browsers and operating) and to speed up our tests

TDD and Software Testers

I’ve been following along with the series of conversations with Martin Fowler, Kent Beck and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) entitled Is TDD Dead. The whole conversation about what’s good, bad and ugly with test driven development (TDD) is interesting in my role as a software tester and from

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 Black Box Test Designer

More accurately I’ve passed the Association for Software Testing‘s (AST) Black Box Software Testing  (BBST) Test Design class. Test Design is a survey class, students are introduced to 30+ types of tests but there is only enough time to focus on a few of them: risk-based testing, specification-based

What I've been up to lately

Things have been busy in the last month or so and I felt like sharing what I’ve been up to lately. Most of it revolves around software testing: April saw the start of Dan Ariely’s A Beginners Guide to Irrational Behavior class on Coursera. I knew I had

How do you handle regression testing?

Matt Heusser sent the context-driven-testing email group a series of questions about handling regression testing. Specifically he asked: How do your teams handle regression testing? That is, testing for features /after/ the ‘new feature’ testing is done. Do you exploratory test the system?  Do you have a standard way to

Rapid Testing Intensive Confirmed!

(Stolen from the Rapid Testing Intensive site) It’s official I’m booked for the onsite Rapid Testing Intensive with James and Jon Bach at the end of July on Orcas Island in Washington. According to the website this testing intensive will be based on “… Session-Based Test Management and Rapid

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