JW on Test

All tours much eventually come to an end and thus it is with my tour with Microsoft. I have resigned my position and am leaving the company. It was a great ride. But the tours will continue. My book Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours...

Every location that covets tourists must have some good reasons for them to come. For Las Vegas it’s the casinos and the strip, for Amsterdam it’s the coffee shops and red light district, for Egypt it’s the pyramids. Take these landmarks away and the...

Bet that got your attention. It's true, but let me qualify it: Running test cases over and over in the hope that bugs will manifest sucks. It’s boring, uncreative work and since half the world thinks that is all testing is about, it is no great wonder...

I am doing another webinar on March 31 which will be hosted by uTest. This is the second webinar I have done for them and I quite enjoyed the first. I have a lot of new material that I have created (and am still creating) for this one which I've called...

As promised, here is the first tour on the tour-of-the-month parade. It's probably not the best place to start, but it's finding so many good bugs for so many testers around the company that I wanted to get it in the hands of others sooner rather than...

I’ve gotten enough requests for links to my interviews, lectures and pointless videos that I am finally tired of responding individually. Here are a few recent ones I have been pointing people to: A video interview on Channel 9 about software testing...

(I couldn’t resist the play on Alan Turing’s famous test when naming this testing metaphor.) When I think of software, I naturally think of it in testing terms. In my mind software is made up of components which are defined by structural boundaries...

There was a full page ad for Jif peanut butter in my morning paper that caught my attention. (For those non-US readers, our nation is experiencing a salmonella bacteria outbreak which has been traced back to contaminated peanuts.) The ad touted Jif’s...

When you’re on vacation do you think about work? Not thoughts of dread, worry or angst but reflection, planning and problem solving. I just did. Last Sunday I awoke in Seattle to freezing temps and a dusting of snow. By midday I was building a sandcastle...

We mostly write test cases that are specifically tied to a single application. This shouldn’t come as any big surprise given that we’ve never expected test cases to have any value outside our immediate team. But if we want to complete the picture of reusable...

I’ve given my ‘future of testing’ talk four times (!) this week and by far the part that generates the most questions is when I prophesize about test case reuse. Given that I answered it differently all four times (sigh), I want to use this space to clarify...

I just got finished talking (actually the conversation was more like a debate) to a colleague, exploratory testing critic and a charter member of the plan-first-or-don’t-bother-testing-at-all society. I am happy to say, he conceded the usefulness ...

As you can imagine there is a pretty lively debate going on over the Zune date math issue here in the hallways and on our internal mailing lists. There are plenty of places one can find analyses of the bug itself, like here , but I am more interested...

Welcome to the new year! 2009 will be the year I publish a new book on testing and the year I ship my first testing tool since Holodeck oh so many years ago. I’m thinking about calling the book exploratory testing . Believe it or not the title isn...

Every since I gave a talk at Google’s GTAC event here in Seattle this past October, I’ve had the chance to interact with a number of Google testers comparing and contrasting our two companies’ approach to testing. It’s been a good exchange. Now it...

As a result of my last post, I got this email from a Microsoft tester whom I work with fairly regularly and admire deeply: "Yet how many Partner or Distinguished Engineer ICs in test do you see? How many testers get onto bench programs vs dev/pm...

I did a webinar for UTest.com today and got some great questions. One question seemed to really resonate: how do you keep good testers from moving to development. I hear this question a lot. Many engineers see test as a training ground for development...

Position requires comparing an insanely complicated, poorly documented product to a nonexistent or woefully incomplete specification. Help from original developers will be minimal and given grudgingly. Product will be used in environments that vary widely...

I gave a keynote at EuroSTAR on the future of software testing where I began by painting a picture of the promise of software as an indispensible tool that will play a critical role in solving some of humankind’s most vexing problems. Software, I argued...

In my Future series I was accused of supporting both sides of the manual v. automated debate and flip-flopping like an American politician who can’t decide whether to kiss the babies or their moms. Clearly this is not an either-or proposition. But I wanted...

Actually, it is more like speaking at Google as I am headed to GTAC tomorrow to give the newest version of my Future of Testing talk. Hope to see you there. I’ve received tons of feedback on my blog posts about the future. So much so that I spent most...

Testing Beyond Release This is the final part of my series on the future of testing. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. For this post I’ve saved what might be one of the more controversial of my predictions: namely that in the future we will ship test code...

Testers as Designers Modern testers play largely a role of late cycle heroics that often goes unappreciated come review and bonus time. When we find the big bug it is because we were supposed to … that’s the expectation. When we miss the big bug, people...

If you only attend one conference on testing, I recommend STAR (East or West). It remains the biggest conference and trade show in the industry and all the best speakers are on their keynote circuit. Unfortunately, I am going to miss next week’s event...

Testing Culture A couple of months ago I attended a lecture given by one of the Empire’s cache of Technical Fellows (maybe he was a Distinguished Engineer, I am not sure as they look so much alike). Like all our TFs the guy was wicked smart and as...