Category Archives: Testing

Testing can be automated or manual. Articles on testing at Tyner Blain involve tracing tests to other artifacts (code, requirements, etc). They also look at process approaches like continuous integration as a framework for testing, and occasionally go into the details of automated testing, or discuss the tradeoffs between blackbox and whitebox testing.

Foundation Series: Inside A Scrum Sprint

People who already use Scrum will only find one new thing in this article – a way to communicate what happens inside a sprint that has proven effective for me.  People who are new to Scrum who wonder “how do things work inside a sprint?” will see how things work in a way that avoids hyperbole and is easy to map to what they already understand from traditional software development processes.

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Failure To Launch (Your Product)

Jump forward in time to the day of your next big product launch (first release, new features, new market segment, etc).  And your site/application crashes due to the “unexpected” demand.  All you can do now is look for a bucket of water to put out the fire.  What could you have done to prevent this disaster?  Jump back to today and start doing it!

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Making Offshore Design Work

When companies first start off-shoring, they usually send the “low level” implementation work overseas first, to work out the process kinks and manage risk. Over time, your valued, domain-aware developers will perceive a lack of career opportunities with this limited role. Naturally, you will want to consider sending design work offshore too. You can make it work. If you do it wrong, you’re toast.

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Making Offshore Development Work

Economic pressures are driving most companies in high-developer-salary markets to explore using offshore development teams as part of their approach to developing software. Developing software with a global team presents new challenges as well as new benefits. If you do it right, you can have a more cost-effective team. If you do it wrong, you can have a disaster.

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You Are Creating Bugs In Your Software

No matter how good your quality process is, you are introducing bugs. This article reviews the places where bugs are introduced in the software development process (from stakeholders to users), and reviews ways to address those bugs.

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Why You Should Test Your Requirements

We’ve written before about several characteristics of well written requirements, and one of those characteristics is testability. Ahamad has written an list of 10 tests of requirements, with an emphasis on assessing the testability of the requirements. The testability of the requirement determines if the resultant product can be tested to determine if it meets the requirement.
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Test Smarter, Not Harder – Part 3

This series is a reprint of an article by Scott Sehlhorst, written for developer.* in March 2006. A recent article on dailytech about “new” methods for software testing points to some very interesting research by the NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) Information Technology Lab. We’ve split the original article into three articles to be more consistent in length with other Tyner Blain articles.

This is part 3 of a 3 part series.

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Test Smarter, Not Harder – Part 2

This series is a reprint of an article by Scott Sehlhorst, written for developer.* in March 2006. A recent article on dailytech about “new” methods for software testing points to some very interesting research by the NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) Information Technology Lab. We’ve split the original article into three articles to be more consistent in length with other Tyner Blain articles.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series.
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Test Smarter, Not Harder – Part 1

This series is a reprint of an article by Scott Sehlhorst, written for developer.* in March 2006. A recent article on dailytech about “new” methods for software testing points to some very interesting research by the NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) Information Technology Lab. We’ve split the original article into three articles to be more consistent in length with other Tyner Blain articles.

This is part 1 of a 3 part series.

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APR: Prototype Update

Just a quick update on the prototype for our agile project. We’ve dramatically improved test coverage, implemented authentication-restriction for some functionality, and refactored a litte of the code. Read on for the latest stats on coverage and testing.

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