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General testing (RSS)
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
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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
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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
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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 (he
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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
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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 seems
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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,
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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
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There's an angle to this debate that I missed during the prevention v. cure series I did last month. It surfaced in a lunchtime conversation I had today with two test managers in our e-home division (these are the guys that test the Media Center PC and
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Ok, we're getting to the end of this thread and probably the part that most of you have asked about: exploratory testing, particularly how it is practiced at Microsoft. We define four types of exploratory testing. This isn’t meant as a taxonomy, it’s
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What a question! I only wish I could convey the way that question is normally asked. The tone of voice is either partially apologetic (because many people remember that I was a major ask-er of that same question long before I became an ask-ee) or it’s
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Manual testing is human-present testing. A human tester using their brain, their fingers and their wit to create the scenarios that will cause software either to fail or to fulfill its mission. Manual testing often occurs after all the other types of
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Now that the testers are once again gainfully employed, what shall we do with them? Do we point them toward writing test automation or ask them to do manual testing? First, let’s tackle the pros and cons of test automation. Automated testing carries both
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God Save the Queen! (A curious statement … from my American point of view. But given what history has recorded of certain of England’s Kings I’ll grant the gender bias. Anyway, Save Her all the same as she presides over a country of such glorious breweries!)
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Ok, re-hire the testers. Perhaps you’ve noticed but the whole prevention thing isn’t working so well. Failures in software are running rampant. Before I talk about where we should invest our resources to reverse this trend, I want to talk about why prevention
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