Notes on testing, automation, and software craft.
Pick a coin from your pocket, and hold it at arms length. Take a good look. Now take another one, of the same denomination and hold it out at arms length as before. Based on your observations alone can you say they are the identical? Lets go a step further. If someone had given… more »
Do your hear phrases like "All our users use [insert some technology]" spoken in your office? or possibly "We have a 'corporate standard' desktop". I have a lot. I have since my first job, back in the '90s. It's a commonly held belief in most of the client companies I've worked… more »
Do you ever feel like we do all this work and maybe we needn't of bothered? Things might have worked out without our intervention. Or we are actually worse off, now, after the work? You're not alone. This is a common problem in any role where you need to investigate the effects… more »
I recently read a post on the Google Testing blog titled: How Google Tests Software Part Three. I added a comment to the post, but that comment has yet to appear . I thought I'd add post my comment here in the mean time. (I've added some links here, for the curious) “I agree… more »
Meet my new friend 2.2250738585072012e 308, We've been hanging out recently. If you've not heard of him, he's about ten years old but thats pretty old in [dog and in] software years. He's getting pretty famous in his old age, but he had humble beginnings as a lowly bug report on… more »
Have you ever had trouble explaining to a non tester why you appear to be intent on breaking their software? It can be difficult to explain why it's important. So I thought a video might help... <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="390" src="https://www.youtube… 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 »
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 »
"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 »
Lets assume we know that our software is not perfect. How can it be? Its complex, mortals created it and we don’t have enough time to test every execution path & environment – so we could never be sure anyway. This is Ok this is normal, testers deal with this situation every… more »