Archive of Testing Articles

April 30th, 2007

APR: Infrastructure Setup

under the hood

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.

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April 16th, 2007

Is Agile Bad For Software Development?

broken software

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.

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April 12th, 2007

The Difference Between Use Cases and Test Cases

praying mantis

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.

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January 4th, 2007

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?

October 2nd, 2006

Rinse, Lather, Repeat – 10 Reasons to Repeat Tests

Why run a test more than once? If it passed the first time, we don’t need to run it again – or do we? James Bach provides ten good reasons to run the same test more than once.

September 12th, 2006

Insight Into Test Driven Development

James Kovacs shares a great insight on software testing and the software testing process. His epiphany about test driven development makes it obvious to all of us why this technique is so powerful.

August 17th, 2006

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.

August 7th, 2006

Quality and Requirements – You Got Chocolate In My Peanut Butter

Quality writers are writing about requirements. Requirements writers are writing about quality. Just like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup – Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together. You can’t have one without the other.

June 13th, 2006

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.

May 29th, 2006

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.