Association for Software Testing

Test Technique, Method, Type or Style (a Flying Tester...)

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:36:50 +0000

Recently I had a discussion with one of my colleague on ‘Boundary analysis is a technique and Function testing is a type’. I knew that there is no point of forcing my view point onto her because she was very strong in her opinion. I told myself that what would make a difference if I [...]

Weinberg Fever! (Martial Tester)

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:21:06 +0000

If it’s a disease, I’ve got it. I blame Scott Barber. ;0) You see I’m writing a book, and through the process Scott pointed me to: Weinberg on Writing – Gerald M. Weinberg So I land on one of my fave online … Continue reading →

Hacking Down a Backlog (TESTHEAD)

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Oftentimes, when we get into doing a lot of things, we find ourselves either dropping items we want to work on, or we seem to forget that there are things we still need to do or that we have committed to do. We also tend to get into a mode when we somehow feel that, if we can’t devote all of our attention to something, it’s out of our reach and it’s just not worth doing.

For fans of Seth Godin’s “Linchpin”, this is a classic trick of “The Resistance”. When faced with what seems like an insurmountable task, we (Read more...)

Really? You can’t replicate this? (Have you ever danced with the tester?)

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:58:00 +0000

Sometimes,
things happen that seem quite straight forward, quite obvious and quite easy to
repeat

And
sometimes they are only quite straight forward, quite obvious, and quite easy to
repeat to you.

I had a
fault with my ASUS EEEPAD Transformer.

I reported
it.

NB. I don’t have the original report but I asked them to send me a copy and this is apparently what I wrote “memory card slot

Testing Today – What are the main challenges? (Have you ever danced with the tester?)

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:26:00 +0000

I’m on the ‘Testing Today’ panel at the Next Generation Testing Conference on Wednesday 23rd May. We’ll be discussing the main challenges to testing today.

What would you ask?

Panel 1: Testing Today – What are the main challenges?
Moderator: Dr Richard Sykes
Panelists include: Stephen Janaway, Nokia; Tony Bruce, Tony Bruce Consulting Ltd; others TBA

Topics to be debated include:-

Testing

On Too Much Process or Too Much, Meh, Whatever (Rhythm of Testing)

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:45:00 +0000

Process – noun -
1. a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve
a particular end
(Oxford English Dictionary)

So, a fair number of people have heard me discuss excitedly (find the euphemism for rant) on how too much process stuff gets in the way of actually getting things done. A fair number of times I pretty well am set in the idea that process should not be a controlling thing or a limiting thing, but a guiding thing.

There is a significant difference between the two of them. Some people don’t want (Read more...)

Devil in the Detail II (Exploring Uncertainty)

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:08:08 +0000

Previously…

Continuing with the theme of review and approval as arguments for detailed test scripts…

Argument 2: “We need scripts so that they can be approved prior to execution”.

Like the previous argument, this expresses both a desire and an assumption:

DESIRE: We want tests to be approved before they are executed.
ASSUMPTION: We can only do that if there are scripts.

Again, we should question if the assumption is valid. It’s much easier for an approver to work through a high level outline of tests than a thousand pages of scripts. I’ve (Read more...)

SummerQAmp Brain Dump: Need BRAAIINS!!!

marketing — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:56:48 +0000

We are rapidly approaching Summer, and with Summer comes summer internships. Specifically, SummerQAmp internships!

With this initiative come up very soon, Michael Larsen and participants in the Education Special Interest Group are actively working to get their ideas down for the education modules that AST is preparing for SummerQAmp. The initial plan was to write everything out, post it, and then massage it down to a useable format. It was determined that this would take a long time, and it would give a very limited amount of time for feedback and review from others.

Instead, Michael and the EdSIG members decided to take a different approach, and we hope that you all will join us. We are discussing the elements that we want to present in the education materials over on the Association for Software Testing’s EdSIG forum. At the moment, you have to be a member of AST to post in the forums, but we may well change that for this initiative, so as to get as many of the interested contributors as possible to be able to post.

In the meantime, though, the forum is open for reading to anyone who wants to participate. If you would like to have your ideas included, please reply in the EdSIG forum threads. If you would like to contribute privately at first, you can also send suggestions, comments or module ideas to Michael Larsen at mkltesthead (at) gmail (dot) com.

On Managers and Mothers and Bush Trimmers (Rhythm of Testing)

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:53:00 +0000

As I’m writing this, it is the evening of Mother’s Day in the US. Because the weather was lovely, much time was spent in the garden this weekend mowing the lawn, trimming bushes, preparing the vegetable garden for the summer. I then took my lady-wife and mother to dinner where we had a lovely meal with nice conversation, a very drinkable bottle of wine and cannoli for the mothers in the party.

It has been a remarkable spring.

The apple blossoms are done – no surprise there. This is fairly normal for us. The pear blossoms are done. This is (Read more...)

Can The Modeller Control The View? (Hiccupps)

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:27:00 +0000

One of the reasons that software testing is challenging, both intellectually and practically, is that the information about the state of the system under test is partial. It’s part of the testing role to formulate a model (or, more usually, a cloud of overlapping, incomplete and contradictory models) that represent our best view of the system at any given time and we’ve developed a collection of monochrome boxes that reflect the idea that access to source code can help make sense of it. But even that doesn’t equate to an understanding of the model that the software has when it (Read more...)