Notes on testing, automation, and software craft.
People want to believe. If you are a tester then you've probably seen this in your work. A new build of the software has been delivered. "Just check it works" you're told, It's 'a given ' for most people that the software will work. This isn't unusual, it's normal human… more »
Why do we refer to our ancestors as Cavemen? The evidence of course! The cave paintings, the rubbish piles found in caves all round the world. It's simple, Cavemen lived in caves, they painted on the walls and threw rubbish into the corner of the cave. Thousands of years later… more »
Office meetings are interesting events. Seriously, even the most boring ones. There's usually an important reason for the meeting, even if that meeting has been lost in the sands of Outlook repeat booking, or the present attendees feel strongly otherwise. There's usually some… more »
At a client site, a few years ago, I had an interesting discussion with a 'senior programmer'. Our discussion centred on a configurable home page. A user could decide what news or other information etc, they wanted to display on their home page. They'd start off by being given a… more »
For those of you that don't know, I'm somewhat of an amateur horologist. I love clocks, watches and all sorts of time and date keeping gadgets. To feed my passion I've decided to invest in my own custom made timepiece. This device will be my first custom made high value item, in… more »
Recently, I was testing a new feature for a client, it had a known bug, that I'd found in prior testing, for which we'd figured out a work around. I was now performing further testing of the feature, hoping to discover more issues and figure out how it behaves a little better.… more »
If you've done the Rapid Software Testing course, then you'll probably be familiar with the Perlclip tool, from James Bach. If not, its a useful tool for generating strings of test text. In particular I find the Perlclip Counter string function to be pretty useful. Counterstring… more »
"If we just run it with this data, and it looks Ok, we'll know it works" the architect says expectantly, "Right?" "You're right, We might see 'it work'", "How would that help?" I answer. "Well errh, it works, so we can put it live tomorrow." We've seen this situation before; it… more »
If you're a tester then you'll no doubt of heard phrases to the effect of "That's pretty unlikely", "Our users don't do that" or "Thats a fairly minor browser". Its been blogged about before, and elsewhere. The argument is many users are niche, novice, confused or from different… more »
Software Testing is essentially an infinitely time consuming task being attempted in a finite time. The 'test space' is almost always vast and near infinite. Your time to test is usually counted in hours. There's an obvious mismatch there. We're testers, we are hired to to help… more »