Observability, Monitoring and Testing Observability blurs the line between testing and monitoring. The concept TOAD can help us think through their relationship and extends it to DevOps.
What's a testing manager? My career has been defined by a lack of test managers. Only 25% of my jobs have had them. That's led to a few interesting challenges.
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
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
The Future of Software Test Engineers and Codeless Tools A few months ago I was chatting with Evgeny Kim about some of the reservations I had while exploring a new codeless test automation tool. He was also exploring some codeless tool options and so he invited me onto his podcast to talk about it. We chatted about a wide
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.
Testing Community of Practice (CoP) Experience Report #1 I published an audio experience report about running my first Testing Community of Practice (CoP) at work. tl;dr it was a really good exercise that I intend to run regularly. Here’s an imperfect transcript: Hello everyone, Chris Kenst here, I wanted to talk about running my first community
Better Tester Training Materials Last month the Association for Software Testing (AST) announced a new partnership with Altom, the owner of BBST®, that enables the AST to refresh our curriculum lineup with the new BBST® Community Track and help fund the future growth of the materials. This partnership and refresh are a huge milestone
Hiring a Software Tester, an Analysis In May of 2020, back when Promenade Group was still called BloomNation, I opened a job posting for a Software Test Engineer. This was to be the first of many test positions we eventually hire for. After going through the whole process of hiring a software tester, I thought it
I'm Speaking at TestFlix It’s true, I’m speaking at TestFlix on November 28th, 2020. You should sign up to join; it’s free to register! I recorded and submitted my 7 minute talk on “Using Test Idea Catalogs for Better Testing”. The premise is: Testers can develop a set of tests or
The TestOpsy Back in January I hosted James Bach and Michael Bolton for an AST webinar on the concept of a TestOpsy or a way to learn about the testing you do by dissecting it. Below you’ll find not only a description and the webinar video but a transcription for what
How to take a screenshot and record video in macOS One of the nice things about macOS are the built-in tools. A recently improved upon built-in tool is called Screenshot which allows users to take a screenshot and record video. Taking screenshots has been around macOS forever, but taking video directly from OS shortcuts came along in macOS Mojave. The
I’m running for the 2020-2022 AST Board of Directors Elections just opened for the Association for Software Testing’s Board of Directors for which I’m a candidate. If you are a voting-eligible member of the AST I’d appreciate the consideration as I run for my 2nd term. For those who are voting (or possibly just interested) I
My First Term on the AST Board of Directors The Association for Software Testing (AST), a non-profit professional organization dedicated to advancing the understanding and science of software testing, has announced a call for nominations for the Board of Directors for 2020-2022. This means my two-year term as a director is coming to an end. I feel fortunate and
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
2019 in Review My yearly tradition has been to summarize the most popular and important (to me) articles I’ve written over the past year along with some reflections and other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in. You can find previous years in review here: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in
What it means to be a leader in testing Background: During CAST I sat for an interview with Pradeep Soundararajan of Moolya Testing. We talked about a few things mostly on what it meant to be a leader in the testing space. They made a short video on the interview so check it out or read the transcript. Transcript:
Help me choose my CAST 2019 schedule I’ll be attending CAST in Cocoa Beach, FL next week and I can’t quite decide what sessions and workshops I want to attend on during the conference days (Wednesday and Thursday). I will definitely live tweet but I’d also like to do some live blogging / recaps / summaries
Five for Friday - July 26, 2019 I have now managed to keep my publishing trend of 4 weeks straight with this post! Here are five links worth exploring: * I recently finished reading (technically I listened to the audiobook) Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. It was a really fascinating book
Do things that don’t scale If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my
Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester Have you ever wondered what a code review is and/or what it’s like to participate in one? Are you a tester, product or business person who regularly interacts with the output of the code but wonders if they could catch bugs earlier by “shifting left”? Turns out you
Move fast and make things better I much prefer the saying move fast and make things better over move fast and break things. The latter might be more popular but the former is more realistic. Moving fast (software agility) used to be a business advantage but now, at least for any service business, it’s mostly
Join my Webinar on Participating in Code Reviews as Tester Last year I wrote an article for Stickyminds about Participating in Code Reviews as a Tester where I made the case for Code Reviews being more than just a chance to catch bugs. They also serve as a chance to see how something is built and have a conversation about
late-April Updates April has come and is nearly gone without any prose being published. I couldn’t have that. You see I’ve been writing but I haven’t condensed that prose into a nice enough package to share. In the meantime lots of things are happening that are worthy of sharing:
Quality Equals Profit – Understanding Quality Helps Us Test A coworker sent me an email about a conversation he had with one of our executives about risk and how quality played into her decision making: “She [the executive] was giving me some insight… As we were discussing the balance of quality policies (as we experienced them in the beta
2018 In Review As it has become a yearly tradition I will attempt to summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 What happened in
Remember remember it's the month of November November has been so packed full of interesting events that it’s time for an update! (Although perhaps not as interesting as Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5th). The first weekend of November I took my position as incoming Treasurer on the Board of Directors for the Association for Software
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
Appropriate Test Documentation & Formatting The Question Recently in an online forum a tester person asked: Does someone have a simple example of test case (excel sheet) format? I am the only one tester in my company and we are trying to arrange the test documentation. Any advice or example will be useful. I wish
How To Run Your Selenium Tests Headlessly in Docker The Old Way It used to be that in order to get your Selenium tests running on a given machine you had to install each individual browser and then the browser drivers (for instance ChromeDriver for Chrome). Some of my most popular posts are about installing these drivers. However that’
Highlights from CAST 2018 Last week I attended CAST in Cocoa Beach, Florida, which was my second time attending and the first since CAST in Grand Rapids back in 2015. It was a fun experience for a number of reasons including giving my first workshop at CAST and being elected to the AST Board
I'm running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors I’m running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors this year. I’m asking for your Vote! (If you are an AST member you’ll see an email for voting on August 6th!) If my name sounds familiar to you it could be because I ran and failed to
8 Tools I use to Accelerate My Testing Inspired by Justin Rorhman’s post of a similar name with a slight twist focusing on tools that generally help accelerate my testing. As a test and quality specialist embedded in an engineering team I have a lot of work to do on any given day. Our engineering team’s
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
late-May Updates Some random thoughts and updates towards the end of May: * On August 8th, Dwayne Green and I are teaching a workshop at the Conference for the Association for Software Testing on Domain Testing (aka Boundary Analysis + Equivalence Class Partioning). Will you be there? If so come to our quick workshop
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
Lessons Learned from the Contributing to GitHub is For You Workshop On April 11, 2018 I gave a workshop called Contributing to GitHub is For You is For You (abbreviated as C2GI4U) in Des Moines, IA to the Des Monies Area Quality Assurance Association (abbrevitated as DAQAA). Roughly 36 people signed up for the DAQAA event meetup and of those about
A GitHub Workshop & why Version Control is a Technical Skill On April 11th, 2018 I’m giving a workshop in Des Moines, IA to the Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association (DAQAA) called Contributing to GitHub Is for You (join us!) on learning to use git with GitHub. The workshop is based on a presentation I did with Matt Heusser
A typical day of Testing (circa 2018) Recently I found myself repeatedly describing how I approach my testing role in a “typical day” and afterwards I thought it would be fun to capture some things I said to see how this might evolve over time: Background * At Laurel & Wolf our engineering team works in 2 week
How to Write a Good Bug Report, use RIMGEN RIMGEN is an acronym and mnemonic (or memory aid) to help us remember the elements of a good bug report. It can be used to help anyone write a better bug report or review existing bug reports looking to make improvements. In general my preference with reporting bugs is to:
2017 In Review As it has become a yearly tradition I will summarize the most popular and important articles I’ve written over the year along with some other forward-looking (and likely wrong) statements mixed in with past reflections. You can find previous years here: 2016 | 2015 The Five Most-Viewed Articles: * 18 Github
mid-January Updates Some random thoughts as I sit here at mid-January of the new year: * I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s newest book Leonardo da Vinci and it’s a fascinating look at how mastery in one discipline or craft such as painting can evolve and become better based on studying
Rebooting the AST's Webinar Series! Last year, after failing in my bid to become a Board Member, I agreed to run the AST’s webinar program. Funny thing was I already had a small list of people and topics I wanted to learn more from / about based on conference and podcast talks. (When something intrigues
Appreciating the appreciation This month I’ve gotten several compliments and positive feedback on how TestingConferences.org has helped them. Some have been speakers, some participants looking for a conference and others have been conference organizers. It’’s a pretty amazing feeling when (in this case) multiple people say they’ve gotten use
Facebook Ad's Massive Design Bug In mid-September ProPublica published an article proving Facebook’s advertising system helped them market to people who expressed interest in radical and racial topics: “Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you. Until this week,
Being a Distributed Tester was hard As a new father, being able to work a few days per week from home has been a great way to help adjust to our wonderful new addition and the demands that go along with him. Days in the office are great for face time and collaboration and days at
Contributing to GitHub is for Everyone at the Online Testing Conference One of our sessions you can’t afford to miss “Contributing to GitHub is for Everyone” with @mheusser & @ckenst https://t.co/dfFpLj6pwQ pic.twitter.com/D1MMQQjicw — onlinetestconf (@OnlineTestConf) May 23, 2017 On June 13th Matt Heusser and I will be giving a talk at the Online Testing Conference
18 GitHub Projects for Testing Aside from it’s many awesome lists GitHub is a really good place for open source testing tools, libraries and frameworks (and their corresponding code). I’m pleasantly surprised by these new (and sometimes old) testing resources, so I’d like to highlight many of them in the hopes others
Testers, don’t be afraid to make Production Changes Scenario: You are testing a new page and there’s a typo. What do you do? * File a bug report? * Mention it in passing and hope the developer fixes it the next time she remembers? * Fix it yourself? If you’ve got access and aren’t afraid to commit (eventual)
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;
Review of The Selenium GuideBook: Ruby Edition tl;dr If you’ve ever wanted to learn Selenium but didn’t know where to start, The Selenium GuideBook is the place (doesn’t matter which edition you use, it’ll be good). Page Contents * 1 Learning Selenium * 2 Book Options * 3 The Book * 4 Applying the Book and
The Promise and Failure of Record and Playback I came across the below video of Bret Pettichord’s keynote presentation to the Selenium Conference in 2011 called “Science and Stories and Test Automation”. Much of the talk covers his experience with Test Automation, specifically the promise and failure of record and playback over the last 20 years (I
As the World Turns “As the world turns” seems like the best way to describe the busy-ness I’ve experienced recently. Feels like I’m forgetting a lot of things and to help I’ve written them down. I’m also feeling goofy so this post might contain a few GIFSs. Work has been
Running Rspec acceptance tests in TeamCity At work we use TeamCity as our CI service to automate the build and deployment of our software to a number of pre-production environments for testing and evaluation. Since we’re already bottling up all the build and deployment steps for our software, I figured we could piggy back on
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
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
Coding Without a Net Yahoo! has been in the news quite a bit over the last few years as it’s primary business of placing display ads slowly dies and it searches for new ways to grow and/or remain relevant. It’s hired new executives, lost new executives and made acquisitions. Plenty of
Exploratory Charters in GitHub Since CAST 2015 I’ve wanted to implement an interesting idea that could potentially give my testing greater visibility and greater scrutiny: Putting exploratory testing charters into our project tracking tool. At work we use GitHub to host our code which means we use GitHub Issues as our bug tracker.
Introducing TestingConferences.org For the past few years one of my professional goals has been to attend (at least) one testing conference or workshop per year, mostly because it’s such a great way to recharge and learn what other practitioners are doing. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good source of events
Catching up on a few Conferences One of the great things about modern testing conferences is most either live stream or record their conference talks so the information can be disseminated to a wider audience. While you don’t get the interaction and conferring that an in-person visit would get you, it does make it easier
10 Years In For 10 years (one whole decade) I’ve been employed in a few different software testing positions with a few different titles. It’s been a fun and challenging road. I’ve navigated large companies filled with good people and backward practices to small companies where modern practices are encouraged
An In-depth look at CAST 2015 The Conference for the Association for Software Testing or CAST 2015 was held in Grand Rapids, MI during the first week of August. Since then I’ve been trying to reflect on what I thought, learned, liked and didn’t like. Here is that reflection in roughly 3,000 words.
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
Shaping Your Identity as a Tester On Thursday, June 25, 2015 I presented my first webinar called Shaping Your Identity as a Tester that was based on an earlier article I wrote called Blogging for your Career. uTest recorded it and made it part of their uTest University series, you can check it out here. I’
The Apple Watch won’t change Testing Probably. The Apple Watch won’t change Testing, probably. Last month uTest announced a contest to win an Apple Watch. All you had to do was provide a response to this post: In just a paragraph, describe how the Apple Watch will or will not change software testing as we
See you at CAST 2015 Thanks to my awesome company’s sponsorship and my wife’s love of travel I will be at CAST this year and attending the tutorial “Delivering Difficult Messages” by Fiona Charles. This is both my first time attending CAST and traveling to Grand Rapids, MI so I’m expecting to
And nothing else funny happened I was recently talking with someone about their testing strategy and process when I noticed they were trying to build overly-detailed test scripts (procedures). It didn’t take them long to realize specifying to such detail often left them bored (writing became redundant) and so each test became less and
Recognizing a problem in eBay’s iPad app I’ve been buying and selling things on eBay for more than a decade. In the last few years I’ve spent more time using the iPhone app but for some reason I wasn’t using the iPad app. I figured it was time, so I installed the eBay app,
State of Testing Survey 2015 In December of 2013 I mentioned Lalit Bhamare and Joel Montvelisky created a survey for assessing the “state” of the testing community to help the community to get a better understanding of what is going on around the world and help testers improve things. They published their results in a
Please sign the Petition to Stop ISO 29119 I signed the Petition to Stop ISO 29119 and I think so should you too. Here’s how: sign this petition! I don’t typically get involved in overly political movements, typically because I don’t feel I have enough information to make an educated or defensible position. I think
Getting better at Domain Testing 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
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
Conference Idea - A Bug Advocacy Boot Camp? If someone asked you to speak at or submit a proposal to speak at a conference do you know what you’d say? I’d say no thanks for now, but I do have an idea for a tutorial. (This is a not-so-well thought out brainstorm and not a proposal.
I'm an AST BBST Instructor That’s right, I completed the trifecta of BBST classes and decided to continue on to being an Instructor. I finished the class in November but just recently got the proof: Boom! Now comes the hard work – working as an assistant through enough classes until I learn the system and
State of Testing Survey 2013 Lalit Bhamare a co-founder and editor of Tea Time with Testers magazine contacted me to share a project he and Joel Montvelisky came up with – a State of Testing survey. Lalit said it best when he described why they wanted to undertake this survey: Some weeks ago my friend, Joel
See you at WTST 2014 The Workshop on Teaching Software Testing, abbreviated as WTST and I think pronounced “what’s it”, is coming up at the end of January 2014 in Melbourne, Florida near the Florida Institute of Technology campus. (You maybe have seen a few of Cem Kaner’s posts.) Just recently my application
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
How to Write a Good Bug Report (and be a Bug Advocate) For the previous BBST classes I made the mistake of not writing about what I learned and the value the classes provided me. To an organization who might consider sponsoring someone (a programmer, analyst…) or to a fellow tester who is looking for a step in the right direction I
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
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
NRG Global Test Competition Retrospective Roughly two and a half weeks ago I competed in the first NRG Global Test Competition. The idea behind the competition was simple: get a bunch of people/ teams together to test a few products, split the competition into two days, one with functional testing and another with performance testing,
Taking the RTI Online In February I attended an online training course where participants test a software product using the Rapid Testing methodology called Rapid Testing Intensive (RTI) Online taught by James Bach. I found it to be a great way to test a product, get feedback on your work, build a software testing
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
The Bug Bounty Hunter I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like thanks to an intense software testing class, travel, a few too many energy drinks which lead to some bad sleep and other life musings. New topics keep coming to mind and although I haven’t had the time to
A Test Group of One I started the Foundations Black Box Software Testing class earlier this week and we are now into lesson two. I thought the discussion question was interesting so I’d like to share it along with my response: [P]lease describe the role of the test group (services and responsibilities) in
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
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
Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 5 The final day of the Rapid Testing Intensive #1: The Group photo – taken on the 4th day (I’m in the 2nd row behind the #1) 9:00 AM – We all picked up our Certificates of Satisficity – saying we completed Rapid Testing Intensive #1 9:05 AM – Jon, as PM,
Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 4 9:02 AM – James starts us off on Day 4. We are going to look at the status of the test project in terms of what we need to accomplish and look for the holes. This is a typical rapid testing management maneuver. James is showing a graph and reiterates
Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 3 9:02 AM – Jon kicks off the Intensive with his project meeting. Talking about the communication between us and his eBay team. 9:07 AM – James talking about the upcoming assignments which will be split between onsite and online. Each table will get a 30 min test session. Later today
Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 2 9:00 AM – Start of the day. James doing some talking about what we did yesterday, he’s built a mind map. James and Jon are going over our schedule – gonna try to stick to it better than we did yesterday. 9:23 AM – Jon is doing a de-brief from
Rapid Testing Intensive 2012: Day 1 Recap This is a previous day recap of the things we did in Rapid Testing Intensive #1, Day 1 on Orcas Island, WA in 2012. I hope I remember everything. Some of the information I took from Karen Johnson’s internal micro-blog. We’ve got eBay’s support, developers online, ready
Enrolled in BBST Foundations It’s official. I’m enrolled in the BBST Foundations course for November through AST. I joined AST (Association for Software Testing) with the end-goal to enroll in the BBST (Black Box Software Testing) Foundations course. I’ve read about the classes, seen a number of experts whom I trust
Do Software Testers Need a College Education I came across an old blog post on the uTest blog Do Software Testers Need a College Education. The author says: Depending on who you ask this question to, you’re likely to receive various degrees (pardon the pun) of yes and no. Or you may find many others who
Anyone Can Test, right? In this video from StarEast, Rob Sabourin talks about his experience with concept of “anyone can test”. This actually gives me an idea for a challenge: Before watching, make a list or jot down some notes that try to describe the potential benefits and problems with assigning any particular person
AST Membership and Learning Goals It’s official I’m a member of the Association for Software Testing or AST as it’s commonly known. I’ve been meaning to sign up so I can take the BBST Foundations Course, meet some local (or not so local) context-driven testers, perhaps post on their discussion boards
What Testers Need to Learn Sunday night I attended a live webinar by James Bach entitled “What Testers Need to Learn” that was put on by Tea time with Testers. It seemed like an interesting topic so I joined (it only cost $30). The webinar got off to a slow start thanks to some technical
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
Throw someone else in to help QA it faster! Throw someone else in to help QA it faster! A former boss (or two) of mine I’ve heard this statement many times in my career but it happened again just recently and it got me thinking. Aside from the poor choice of words, about “QAing” something (is that really
Testing Idol Worship? With software testing I’ve found it important to identify a few key experts in the field to see what they’re saying, doing, reading, etc. in order to learn and expand my testing thinking. Maybe it’s the size of the industry, the lack of “basic” testing education but
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
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
Are Testing "Schools" a Good Idea? There has been some controversy with Cem Kaner announcing the Context-Driven School of Testing will no longer be called a school. Cem believes (as I understand it) calling something a “school” is too divisive resulting in an exclusionary system that might possibly ignore people with great ideas who don’t
Bach Brother's Rapid Testing Intensive When I was at StarWest in October of last year I had the good fortune of running into James Bach at the end of the day. I participated in a Rapid Software Testing class with his partner in crime Michael Bolton the prior day and sneaked into James’ Critical Thinking
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
My Tester's Commitments My job is to help programmers look good; to support them as they create quality; to ease that burden instead of adding to it. In that spirit, I make the following commitments: 1. I provide a service. You are an important client of that service. I am not satisfied unless
Becoming a Software Testing Expert From a software tester’s point of view a lecture entitled Becoming a Software Testing Expert is a bit enticing. A lecture by James Bach is even more so. Bach, widely considered an expert in Software Testing, is a passionate advocate of software testing. As an expert he’s in
StarWest 2011 Keynote Presentations I’ve uploaded two Keynote Presentation’s from this years (2011) StarWest conference. The first is James Whittaker’s Keynote entitled All That Testing is Getting in the Way of Quality: The second is the Lightning round Keynote featuring a number of testing luminaries like Michael Bolton, Lee Copeland, Bob
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
Testing at the Speed and Scale of Google This is an interesting blog post from Google Engineering about how 50% of their code changes every month and how important their continuous integration system is. It’s worth a read to know a little bit more about How Google Tests Software. http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/2011/06/testing-at-speed-and-scale-of-google.html
5 Ways to Revolutionize your QA I can’t remember where I originally found this post and the corresponding eBook but the eBook is definitely worth taking a look at. Here is the former uTest blog post, now Applause blog post. The 5 ways or insights are: 1. There are two types of code and they
Summary: How Google Tests Software As a software tester I try to learn as much as I can about how other companies test software. It just so happens that through Google’s testing blog James Whittaker has taken steps to outline just how Google does it. If you’re interested in learning more I’d