This is a test exercise. U. S. Dollar amount Canadian Dollars Mexican Pesos Euros Equivalent in … Validate Reset Calculate Set to 5 The time is?
More on the “Attack on the Testing Role”
About a month ago I took a slide from James Bach’s Orcas Island Training and posted it to twitter. The internet became very upset, I suspect more from the writing style than the content. As the person who posted a single slide without context, I felt obligated to explain and wrote up a 1,600 word […]
We’re going to Orcas Island
“The shoemakers children have no shoes” may be a common expression, but it is common because it is true enough, enough of the time. The mechanic’s car is a beater that goes without repair, the doctor refuses to get help about his back, the trainers and consultants don’t pay for training. That might be true […]
What have we been up to?
It’s been a busy few months at Excelon. The New York Trip, a brief European tour, Justin went to Boston for STPCon, thanksgiving, lots of writing – actually lots and lots of writing, just not any of it here. Let me tell you about it. Before all that happened, over the summer, Joe Colantonio interviewed […]
Footprints in the Sand
I came across a lot of ideas in graduate school. Some, like Test Driven Development, Extreme Programming and Scrum skyrocketed my career forward. Others were models – a way of seeing the world – that were on the way out. I am particularly struck with how we thought about the test “phase” in my introduction […]
What Are People Saying About TestRetreatNYC?
In the three days since we announced TestRetreatNYC in August, we’ve sold half the tickets. Many of the folks attending the conference are coming back; they been to Test Coach Camp, TestRetreat:Madison, or WHOSE, and want more. That’s great. If you haven’t been to a peer conference, you may be wondering what to expect. So […]
The Software Testing World Cup
Imagine a world test competition, held over the internet, on your continent, in a time zone that is reasonable for you, on a Saturday, with local judges you know and respect. The winners from each continent advance to the Global Competition, held in Potsdam Germany in November 2014 at Agile Testing Days. Those six teams(*), […]
New Articles — and an announcement
I just got back from interop, the conference for emerging technologies that connect business – from data center to cloud to switches, servers, and software. It was an incredibly busy week. You might not have been there, but the “dessert first” part of the story is all of the articles that came out of the […]
Four Testing Strategies
I’ve spent a good deal of time lately thinking about how we frame the problem of software testing – and how we solve it. It impacts how we see the world, and how we treat each other. Over the weekend, I came up with four fundamental strategies in software testing, which I considered writing up […]
The Wikitest Framework
UPDATE: I want to do a post on the importance of limiting ambiguity and making sure you have as much meaningful consensus as possible – a counterbalance to my last post. Still, that’s going to be a whopper. I also want to respond to some of Shrini and Llya’s comments. Again, those will be be […]
100% Test Automation
A recent post I put out to the Agile-Testing List: The original poster asked:> I have been asked to work out a system to make a 100%> automated testing solution to suit the agile development> process that the dev team are using. Perhaps I don’t understand what 100% automated testing solution means. When I hear […]
The Nine Forgettings
“If you measure the wrong thing, and you reward the wrong thing, don’t be surprised if you get the wrong thing.” — Lee Copeland Lee’s talk is about 34 minutes and challenges how the typical company does software testing. It’s a good watch, and it’s free.
Explaining Exploratory Testing
I’m a big fan of exploratory testing. I believe it can be a much more effective method of software testing than hard-coded automation or manual scripts, both of which suffer from both inattentional blindness and the minefield problem. The problem is explaining it. People seem to fall into two camps – 1) Those who believe […]
Extreme QA?
Back in 2002, James Canter and Liz Derr wrote a paper on “Extreme QA.” While I don’t agree with everything in the article, and I think their use of the term is … questionable, I do like when people are thinking, trying new things, and writing about the process. Overall, it’s an interesting article; you […]
Is it a DSL or an API?
One of the “new new” things in developer-centric testing is using Ruby to create customer acceptance tests in a unique, domain specific testing language. Chromatic takes a humorous look at “DSL”s in Ruby here.
Lighting Talks Web Page Up –
I am now officially in recruiting mode for lightning talks to ST&PCon, and have added a web page about lightning talks – here.
Greased Lightning (Talks)
Lightning Talks are ten five-minutes talks in a sixty-minute slot. As a speaker, I enjoy them because they sharpen my mind. There’s no time for an introductory joke, no long agenda, no 15 minutes of “body” with 15 minutes of Q&A at the end. Nothing to hide behind. You get to make one point, make […]
Testing Philosophy II –
About every four months, Shrini Kulkarni convinces me to drop the term “Test Automation” from my vocabulary. After all, testing is a creative, thinking process. We can automate some steps of what we are doing, speeding up repetitive work – but those don’t turn out to be the investigative, critical thinking steps(*). Still, I want […]
Ruby Vs. Python for Testing
There is an interesting discussion going on on the Agile-Testing Yahoo Group right now, about the differences between Python and Ruby. It is oddly reminiscent of conversation I’ve had a dozen times recently – about the advantages of Ruby Vs. Perl. All of the old-school computer scientists are saying that there isn’t much difference, while […]
My theory of software testing – I
What’s the right mix of exploratory testing, “planned” manual testing, and test automation? My short answer is “it depends.” Now, you don’t need to point out that “it depends” is non-helpful – I realize that – and I am going to try to go beyond it. The reason I say “it depends” is that it […]