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.

Measuring the Cost of Quality: Software Testing Series

Should we test our software? Should we test it more?

The answer to the first question is almost invariably yes. The answer to the second question is usually “I don’t know.”

We write a lot about the importance of testing. We have several other posts in our series on software testing. How do we know when we should do more automated testing?

Software development process example

We’ve presented an example of the software development process across several posts over the last two weeks. In this post we tie them all together, showing the steps in process order.

Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part Three

This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.

Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.

Sample Use Case Examples

We talked about informal use cases a while ago in our use case series. Over a series of posts, we are demonstrating the process of defining a software product. The next step, and subject of this post, is the creation of informal use cases to support the defined goals for the software.

MRD to PRD Requirements Conversion

A real world example of converting from an MRD to a PRD. This is the process of translating from a market-requirements view of the product to a product-requirements view of the product.

Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part Two

This is the second in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated test suite.

Part 2 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Top five problems with test automation suites. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 3, pretend that this is the title.

Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part One

This post is a follow-up to our previous case study on incorporating unit testing into an existing team’s development environment. The case study is based on a real solution that has already started reaping rewards for our client, and is gaining momentum. We’re now looking at making it easier for the development team to maintain this test suite, and proposing some extensions – including a form of tagging.

Software Testing Series: Top Three Measurements of Quality

The three most important things to understand about the quality of your software are the three things most relevant to your business and your stakeholders (and arguably, your boss).

Top three measurements of software quality

1. How do people perceive our quality?
2. How big of a problem is our quality?
3. How bad is our software, really?

Where Bugs Come From

In the Foundation series article on software processes we introduce a definition of software process as three steps – (decide, develop, deliver). That article will provide some contextfor this discussion, which dives more deeply into the three steps (decide, develop, deliver).

Software testing series: A case study

This post is a test automation case study, but at a higher level.

We’ll talk about it in terms of defining the problem, and then discuss the objective (what we proposed to do to solve the problem), the strategy (how we went about doing it) and the tactics (how we executed the strategy). Since this happened in the real world, we’ll also identify the constraints within which we had to operate.