Lauren Arbittier Davis recently started Alkali Marketing, a boutique marketing outsourcing company here in Austin. I’ve personally worked with Lauren over much of the past decade, and couldn’t be more excited about her company! When Tyner Blain is ready to build awareness (beyond our current viral approach), Alkali is who […]
How To Interview When Gathering Requirements
We previously stressed the importance of understanding why something is a requirement. Unfortunately, we can’t just ask “why why why?!” until we reach the end of the chain. This won’t be any more effective for us now than it was when we were in kindergarden. Eventually, our listeners will get frustrated, or worse, defensive.
Top Five Requirements Gathering Tips
Interviewing, Brainstorming, Documenting Use Cases, Prototyping, and Analyzing Documents are our top-five tips. Read more for details
Software Testing Series: Black Box vs White Box Testing
Should I use black box testing or white box testing for my software?
You will hear three answers to this question – black, white, and gray. We recently published a foundation series post on black box and white box testing – which serves as a good background document. We also mention greybox (or gray box) testing as a layered approach to combining both disciplines.
Given those definitions, let’s look at the pros and cons of each style of testing.
Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing
Blackbox tests and whitebox tests.
These terms get thrown about quite a bit. In a previous post, we referenced Marc Clifton’s advanced unit testing series. If you were already familiar with the domain, his article could immediately build on that background knowledge and extend it.
Software testing can be most simply described as “for a given set of inputs into a software application, evaluate a set of outputs.” Software testing is a cause-and-effect analysis.
Are people reading your requirements? A blogversation.
Tony just put up a post at Seilevel’s blog on making sure your spec is reviewed. Kent Newsome recently posted about starting cross-blog conversations here, possibly inspired by Amy Gahran’s post about it here. Tony’s post is a great topic to cross-blog about. Three easy steps to blogversation Post your […]
Software testing series: Introduction
Software testing is a field that is so broad reaching that you can write hundreds of books about – and people have. There are different techniques and different tools. New testing technologies are being created all the time. There are a host of different goals – testing requirements, testing designs, […]
You can fool some of the SQL some of the time…
Thanks to the folks who pointed out to me that the blog was down for almost 12 hours today. The mysql database for our blog went down and it took a little while to get it operational again. Now to get back to the actual business of posting content…
More on choosing the right software process
B. Scott Burkett writes a post, Choosing the right methodology, that is worth a read. He proposes that you pick your process (incremental, RUP, agile, waterfall) depending on the circumstances of each project. This builds nicely on the discussion we started in our Foundation series post, Software process (waterfall process […]