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 test cases that I painted in my last post...

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 my own thinking and to add some specifics....

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 to supply some clarity in how I think about...

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 with our products and be able to exercise that 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 ask questions. It’s often a case of ignored...

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 he presented a design for some new product he and...

Visualization What does software look like? Wouldn’t it be helpful if we had a visualization of software that we could use while the software was being constructed or tested? With a single glance we could see that parts of it remain unfinished. Dependencies, interfaces and data would be easy to see...

Moving Testing Forward There is a gap that exists in testing that is eating away at quality, productivity, and the general manageability of the entire development lifecycle. It is the gap between when a bug is created and when that same bug is detected. The larger the gap, the more time a bug stays...

So we are now at my third prediction which deals with information and how testers will use information to improve their testing in the future. Prediction 1: Testsourcing Prediction 2: Virtualization Prediction 3: Information What information do you use to help you test your software? Specs...

In order for testsourcing to take hold of the future of testing, two key technological barriers must be broken: the reusability of test artifacts and the accessibility of user environments. Let me explain: Reusability : The reusability of software development artifacts, thanks to the popularization...

This is the first post of a multipart series on my predictions about the future of software testing and how testers of the future will do their job. Outsourcing. It’s a familiar term and the way a lot of testing gets done here in 2008. However, it wasn’t always so and it’s not liable to be that way...