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Testing includes: Building a useful mental model of the application under test, including what value it should provide and what risks could threaten that value, Designing powerful tests, using that model to investigate important questions about the application’s quality, Test execution (which might be automated entirely, partly, or not at all), Analyzing the results to [...]

One of my favorite quotes from The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner, By labeling a bundle of problems with a single conceptual label, we make dealing with that problem easier — provided we’re not interested in solving it. Phrases like “urgently needed measures for combating unemployment” roll easily off the tongue if we don’t [...]

I was just looking over the talks from the 2009 Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) in Zurich In test automation, the most difficult challenge is often finding a useful Test Oracle — a heuristic mechanism by which we can determine if our test has found a bug. This is perhaps particularly true when we’re trying to use automated [...]

Prashant Chavan expressed frustration today on the Agile Testing mailing list about there not being any standard definitions of testing terms. I can sympathize. That said, one of the hallmarks of becoming a more experienced tester is learning that there are no standard definitions…and can’t be any, given the lack of consensus in the field [...]

More and more web applications are taking advantage of asynchronous JavaScript (or AJAX) – and with good reason. It gives tremendous power to a web application, allowing the app to respond fluidly to the user without requiring a full page reload and making it feel more like a native desktop app. At the same time, [...]

Software Testing has many joys. Most have to do with solving tricky puzzles, collaborating with brilliant minds, or contributing to the creation of elegant software…but sometimes there are simpler pleasures as well. Today a colleague sent around a prototype of an application that takes any string and attempts to pluralize it. It handles a lot of [...]

Here’s a 22 minute video lecture on using controlled experiments to discover what your customers think, and if you work on web software I suspect you’ll find it 22 minutes well spent. Kohavi points out several examples where the results of tests were quite surprising, as well as some interesting suggestions for how to organize [...]

  First, a quick note on terms. I tend to use James Bach’s definition of Testing as “Questioning a product in order to evaluate it”. All test rely on /mental/ models of the application under test. The term Model-Based Testing though is typically used to describe programming a model which can be explored via automation. [...]

On the watir-general email list, George Sanders recently wrote “It seems that I’ve been encountering more people within my workplace (and, alas, even within my own QA team!) that are not sold on test automation. From what I’ve learned so far, there seems that automation will never cover 100% of what needs to be tested, [...]

A sign of the times, I know a handful of great testers and coders who’ve been laid off in recent months. One I just heard about today is Chris McMahon. I first encountered Chris as a contributor on the Watir, Software-testing, and Agile-testing mailing lists. At the time, I was QA Manager for a company [...]