Test Guide

It's good to be back! I am just recently back from Colombia. The good folk at SQA flew me down to talk with their clients about testing software. I took some vacation time as well, to ensure that my wife and I would have time to do some sightseeing ....

Linda asks how one gets into the software testing field. "Are there certain formulas I would need to know or certain classes I would need to take? Or is it something I would have to learn as I go along the way?" To my knowledge there is not yet any...

Apoorva writes: Handling bugs when you are relatively close to ship date? Would like to hear some "real time" stories about some difficult decisions you had to make while shipping a product and what made you take those decisions. Say, convincing dev to...

First up today: Elisabeth Hendrickson discussing how in the world testing can survive in an Agile world. After all, Test traditionally uses all that time it takes Dev to give us something useful to write and review test plans, test specs, and test cases...

All that theory is great, but without a practical application none of it matters. Thus Surveyor. Surveyor is a simple application for creating online surveys. The UI will look something like this: You have three sets of questions: those you have...

Your Logical Functional Model lets you write test cases from your user's point of view, test cases that focus on what is being done rather than how it is being done. Your Physical Object Model lets your test cases ignore the details behind interacting...

When my first test manager left Microsoft he told the team this was his favorite bug and it is easy to see why (testers are often asked about their favorite bugs when they leave). On his first week on the job one of my friends hit a crash in the speech...

All of these problems combine to make Test perpetually perceived as the “long pole”, since most Test work is done very late in the milestone. Most modern product and feature teams acknowledge that involving Test early in the development process (that...

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...

Stuart responded to my post "Show Me" saying that, basically, he's in the same boat as (based on my personal experiences) most people producing software: what I call programming by accident. Specs are few and far between. He does actually have a tester...

Test cases do not often make a distinction between the user actions a test case is testing and the steps it takes to invoke those actions. Indeed, most test cases explicitly tie these details together! Because much emphasis is placed on testing every...

For awhile I was the only person on the Mrmff team (we're not announced yet so I can't give details, remember?) blogging. Then Adam Ulrich , my boss and the Mrmff Test Manager, start blogging. Now John Gossman is blogging too. He's our Dev Architect,...

Darren writes: Hi, I read through your list of attributes today with interest. One of the attributes that interests me but, that you did not mention was: Ability to provide accurate estimates. I'd be interested to read *your* take on that attribute. Estimation...

Refactoring I'm familiar with. Ken Pugh I'm familiar with. Ken Pugh talking about prefactoring sounded interesting. And it was! You may not know what prefactoring is. I didn't. Ken defines prefactoring as "developing code that reduces the need to refactor...

My team has a goal of 110% automation, but: not every test is worth automating. What's more, the value in automating a particular test case changes depending where in the product cycle you are. Or as I said in a presentation on this topic: What should...

When Jeffrey Richter - who has been consulting to Microsoft lo these many years - talks about "Controversial .Net Topics", anyone who is interested in .Net sits up and listens. The first topic Jeffrey talked about is protecting intellectual property....

When you're in college December and May are the big "What do I want to do with my life?" points, but once you're out in the real world January takes over this timeslot. Of course, if you really care about your career and life goals you'll be pondering...

This afternoon was a half-day tutorial on exploratory testing. Elisabeth Hendrickson gave an engaging talk - complete with in-class exploratory testing - that presented four techniques for doing successful exploratory testing: variables (anything whose...

Apoorva asks: How do work assignments take place for STE's? An example would be, I was testing this product which involved client/server stuff. I was assigned to test the funtionality of the server. In short, anything in the spec which was server related...

I'm at Software Development West this week. My brain always hurts by the end of the week (this is my eighth SD) but right now that pain is far off. First up is a half-day tutorial on Domain Driven Design presented by Eric Evans (author of the book by...

Chris posted a great comment a while back that I am going to mine for a series of posts. He starts out by saying "I'm struggling with the contribution that testers make early in a project right now." The answer is simple: a lot, if you let them. "Everyone...

I've talked about testability before , but I recently had an experience that reinforced for me how improving testability directly improves the product. I am working with my good friend and mentor John Gossman to write a Visio-to-XAML converter. Our first...

The most interesting recent bug was a Vista upgrade error that was initially assigned to my component. We had a couple of Watson reports where the symptom was there would be an error logged during upgrade which caused a fatal error and a roll-back. Unfortunately...

Test cases are composed of three primary sections: Cache initial state. The primary task for any test case is verifying that an action had the intended effect; if the test case is to know what changed it clearly must save off the starting state...

Weird Al Yankovic's song “Frank's 2000 Inch TV” is the perfect speed for jumping rope! Play it four times in a row and you've got yourself a great cardio workout!