Software development / Test Automation / Testing

John Henry, Manual Tester

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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.

Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Foundation Series: Functional Testing of Software

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Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.

Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Software testing series: A case study

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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.

Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software

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Testing software is more than just manually banging around (also called monkey testing) and trying to break different parts of the software application. Unit testing is testing a subset of the functionality of a piece of software. A unit test is different from a system test in that it provides information only about a particular subset of the software. In our previous Foundation series post on black box and white box testing, we used the inspections that come bundled with an oil change as examples of unit tests.

Polls / Requirements / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Software Testing Series: Black Box vs White Box Testing

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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 / Polls / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing

Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing

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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.