A look back at the best from a year ago
Flashback
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Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-01-13]
A look back at the best from a year ago
Communication / Consulting / Product Management / Requirements / Software development / Testing / Use Cases
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Communicate Relevant Quality Metrics
Most teams think about testing in terms of code coverage – what % of the lines of code are covered? What matters to our stakeholders is how well the software works. More precisely, how well does the software let the users work? We should be targeting our quality message in terms of use cases, because that matches their perspective and context.
Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development
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This Software Sucks! – Say Users
You need to read Scott Berkun’s Essay # 46 – Why software sucks (and what to do about it). His content is great, his style is easy and fun, and he has good insights. If his other essays are this good, he goes in the same bucket as Joel Spoelsky and Paul Graham for us. As Berkun points out, we don’t set out to write bad software. Here’s how we can avoid some of the different mistakes.
Process Improvement / Software development / Testing
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The code freeze is killing the dinosaurs
The software development process for most companies has a flow – gather requirements, design, implement, test, release. There can be feedback loops, iterative cycles, spirals or waterfalls, but they all have these steps. When teams “freeze the code” and submit to test, they are creating their own mini-ice age and dooming themselves to extinction.
Lists / Software development / Software requirements specification / Test Automation / Testing
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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.
Marketing / Testing
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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?
Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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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.
Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software
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.