Test Guide

It seems to me that lots of people are experiencing lots of confusion regarding what lots of the testing terms we throw around signify. In an effort to remedy this circumstance I have applied my investigatory powers to observe what people really mean...

Recently I read Eugene Kennedy's On Becoming A Counselor , and currently I am immersed in Jerome Groopman's How Doctors Think . Both authors make a point which I have been concurrently learning via other avenues as well: my emotional state Big Time affects...

[With apologies to the Monotones...] I wonder, wonder who, who-oo-ooh WHO Who wrote the Book Of Bugs? Tell me, tell me, tell me Oh, who wrote the Book Of Bugs? I've got to know the answer; Musta been someone who loved to debug. Oh, I wonder,...

Tell me, please, when exactly it is OK to park here? This is perhaps the most complicated set of parking rules I have seen. I am glad that a) I do not have a car, and b) I do not live anywhere near these street signs!

When a Microsoftie moves to a different group we typically take one of our machines with us. I opted to take my four-year-old desktop as that meant I also took my flat panel monitors, to which I have grown rather attached. As I frequently work outside...

Diligent Reader Ayaz asks: Everywhere there is talk about *the tester mentality* and how the testers should refine their approach towards a problem. My question is what would you advise a *developer* so that he can test his code and catch the bugs...

Most user actions in an application can be executed in different ways. As I mentioned earlier, creating a new document can be done via the following methods: Clicking the File menu, clicking the New submenu, then clicking the New Document menu item...

Most test cases that manipulate a user interface are tightly tied to the current details of that UI. What the test case is doing often gets lost in the details of how it is doing it. We abstract away these implementation details by wrapping our application...

What if you had a test case that looked like this? (Assuming a shape-drawing application such as Microsoft Visio...) Logical.Projects.CreateNewProject(); Point rectangleStart = DataManager.ScenePointProvider.GetNextValue(); Point rectangleEnd =...

Our BVTs have grown rather encumbered and encrusted of late, so we recently embarked on a project to trim them down to a more reasonable size. This turned out to be an interesting process, mostly because it quickly became clear that we didn't have a single...

I recently read an (internal, so I can't give a link, sorry) article by a developer pundit. In the article he opines that while the current practices of unit testing, etc. are having a definite impact on code quality, eventually we will reach a point...

It's rather a peculiar state of affairs, but one sign of a well maintained infrastructure is that there is always some part of it under construction. Right now downtown Seattle is in various stages of de- and construction as crews build light rail...

This morning I'm learning about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) from Dave Astels . At its core, BDD is just Test Driven Development (TDD) with different syntax. TDD relies on unit testing frameworks, and everything you do references testing: Your...

For the past several months I have been testing setup for my application. Actually, that's not true - it is only about two weeks ago that I started testing. The two months before that I: Wrote the test specification, getting it reviewed and signed...

" style="WIDTH: 55px; HEIGHT: 20px" height=20 alt=" " src="http://www.thebraidytester.com/images/spacer.gif" width=55 mce_src="http://www.thebraidytester.com/images/spacer.gif"> What I have had most difficulty learning about drawing is probably also...

Here's a puzzle for you: I am out camping. One day I mark my spot and then walk one mile due south, at which point I turn ninety degrees to my left and walk one mile due east. I pause to admire the scenery, am startled by a bear, and run one mile due...

I am excited to announce that as of now MSDN has a Tester Center ! Here you will find articles, blogs, videos, the Software Testing Discussion Forum , plus an aggregation of all the testing-related Microsoftie-run blogs we know about. Head on over for...

In many of my posts I have alluded to the automation stack my team is building, but I have not provided any details. The next month or so of posts will remedy that: first I'll discuss the problems we are trying to solve and then I'll explain how we're...

When I was a fresh-faced programmer I was the fastest codeslinger around. I could spew code out like nobody's business. I didn't need to bother with design or spec'ing. You want a program to do what? Bam! Here it is. Something not quite right? Bam! Here...

I was xcopying some folders this weekend. (xcopy: the poor man's backup system.) Everything was going swimmingly. Or so I thought, until I noticed that some files that should have been copied weren't. What!? xcopy has never failed me before! What's going...

In Ring One, here, we have The Cowboys. They don't need specs or a test plan, let alone daily builds or release criteria. They don't even bother finding out what the user needs to do, really, but instead prefer to make things up as they go along. Since...

Every year my family draws names to decide who gives gifts to whom at Christmas. (Trying to figure out what to give one person is *so* much easier than trying to find something for seven!) This year (for reasons known only to her) my mom asked if I wanted...

Futura writes that s/he has been a developer and then a tester for many years. In that time, s/he has used many languages, including C++,VB, Python, and MatLab. Futura is planning to apply for an SDE/T position and is looking for advice on answering the...

I think my team - much of Microsoft, in fact - is going about testing all wrong. My team has a mandate from on high to automate one hundred percent of our testing. We aren't the only ones either, I don't think. This is a great goal (even if it isn...

As soon as you have even a vague idea about what your feature is all about you can start defining your Logical Functional Model. Ideally your entire feature team will take part in this exercise, but you can certainly do it on your own as well. Ask yourself...