This morning I finished up the infrastructure setup for our project. A bunch of under the hood work. Definitely required some propeller-head skills. The goal of this work is to get us to a working prototype as soon as possible. There are a couple links to some good agile testing articles, and the rest of this one is a quick list of what we did on Friday and today.
Category Archives: Testing
Is Agile Bad For Software Development?
Last week, Ivan Chalif, a product manager / blogger, tapped into a thread criticising product managers for not adopting and espousing agile, or at least rapid-release techniques. In this article we look at Ivan’s comments and one of the articles that he referenced. We also share our own perspective and an alternative analysis of what may have happened.
The Difference Between Use Cases and Test Cases
People who are new to software, requirements, or testing often ask “What’s the difference between a use case and a test case?” This article answers that question, by building on earlier articles about use cases and use case scenarios. At the soundbite level, each use case has one or more scenarios, and each use case scenario would lead to the creation of one or more test cases.
Crossing The Desert With Bad Project Planning
Johanna Rothman recently wrote an article with a poignant introduction: “A project team focuses on an interim milestone, works like the devil to meet that milestone. They meet the milestone, look up, and realize they’re not at the end of the project–they still have to finish the darn thing. They’re living the Crossing the Desert syndrome.” Fixing it isn’t enough – how do we prevent it from happening?
Posted in Agile, Communication, Process Improvement, Project Management, Software development, Testing
Tagged CMMI, continuous integration, effort allocation, estimation, incremental delivery, iterative development, managing data, pm, scheduling, scope creep, testable requirements, timeboxing, use cases, verifiable requirements, writing requirements
1 Comment
John Henry, Manual Tester
There’s a piece of North American folklore about John Henry, who was a manual laborer during the expansion of the railroads in our country. His job was being replaced by steam-driven heavy equipment, as the railroad industry applied technology to become more efficient. The same dynamics are happening today with manual testers. We need to make sure that manual testers avoid John Henry’s fate – read on to see why.
Posted in Requirements, Requirements gathering, Software development, Testing
Tagged managing data, quality and requirements, quality requirements, requirements and quality, requirements elicitation, requirements errors, requirements quality, writing good requirements, writing quality requirements
Leave a comment
Writing Verifiable Requirements
One of the ten big rules of writing a good MRD is writing verifiable requirements. Verification is both a function of having a precise goal, and having the ability to affordably measure the requirement. A precise goal is a verifiable requirement if we can clearly answer “yes” or “no” when asked if the requirement has been implemented. We also face the practical realities of being able to measure the results profitably.
Posted in Product Management, Requirements, Software requirements specification, Testing, Writing
Tagged business requirements documentation, good requirements, managing data, product requirements, requirements documentation, requirements verification, software requirements, verifiable requirements, writing business requirements, writing requirements
Leave a comment
Test Smarter, Not Harder – A Detailed Article
A detailed (15-page) article by Scott Sehlhorst showing how to incorporate test automation for complex software has been published at developer.*. This article shows the math, benefits, and weaknesses of traditional approaches to automating functional tests. The article also proposes improvements to the process, rethinking the problem to provide innovative solutions. This post discusses the background for the article and provides an overview, as well as links to related content.
Latest Articles
Comments on all Articles
