An engineering approach to Software Testing and Test Automation

“A buffet is a system of serving meals in which food is placed in a public area where the diners generally serve themselves.” – that’s from Wikipedia. The place where I’ve had lunch today was just like that, except the actual meal wasn’t the point. Instead, we served each other ideas and challenges on testing [...] ...

I have made two major investments into my professional development this year. One of them, taken in April, is the course of Rapid Software Testing. I wrote about my experience and takeaways, as well as proudly gave a personal endorsement. Another course, similar and different at the same time, is Black Box Software Testing (Foundations [...] ...

Publication URL: http://www.thetestingplanet.com/2011/11/november-2011-issue-6/ Download PDF: The Testing Planet November Issue And you can view the large mind map here (click to open in a separate window). ...

Note. The reason of this posting is two-fold: While considering taking the Rapid Software Testing course I found surprisingly little of feedback information on testers’ blogs, and none of that addressed the questions I actually had. So I’m fixing this issue retrospectively. There are too many aggressive pseudo-education “courses” or scamming certification schemas advertised on [...] ...

Modern applications have a few layers of ‘defense’ that are supposed to protect against unauthorized access. The very first layer is at the front-end, merged with the UI. The UI part, client-side part, is at user’s computer and therefore users have the most capacities to manipulate it. Penetration testing is a purely exploratory testing activity. [...] ...

Archery is a craft, practice, and skill. I dedicated a fair amount of time in my youth when I practiced sports archery, and I still like Medieval age novels. Needless to say, now I dedicate a lot of my time to the craft of testing – but there are analogies to archery that we can [...] ...

Being a facilitator at Weekend Testing Americas I often invite people to participate in our sessions. I get all kinds of responses but one is particularly interesting: “I would participate in a session if you give me test cases to execute”. I answer differently to this one. I may suggest to try designing and executing [...] ...

In this post I’m sharing our up to date experience mindmapping team-based exploratory testing as well as stating some expectations that a mindmapping product should meet to fulfill our needs. Structure As you can see, GUI part of the structure is the most developed here. Mapping is pretty obvious. However, we’ve identified the following problems. [...] ...

In this post I share experience on how we’re building and using the process model; it’s an expansion of ideas from the previous post. The picture above is based on the sketching we made with Michael Larsen while conferring on Skype. However, the elements and solutions used in there are rooted in Rapid Testing and BBST [...] ...

Here I’m looking at the challenges logged in the previous post. I wasn’t the first one saying that it might be good to have certain expansions of Weekend Testing format. What if we have longer sessions? What if we do follow-up sessions? I think these expansions help addressing challenges like “complexity of a mission” on [...] ...

Note. Don’t expect a complete and consistent blog post. Below are my notes put down while exploring the subject. I have been participating in the Weekend Testing movement for almost a year, since Michael Larsen opened the Americas chapter. I enjoyed both tester-on-a-mission and facilitator roles. As a co-facilitator I planned and prepared a few [...] ...

Although it seems like just happened yesterday, it’s been well over a quarter since I took the course of Rapid Software Testing by Michael Bolton (the course is authored by James Bach and Michael Bolton). This is a major milestone in my learning of exploratory, heuristic-based testing approach. To be fair, I was somewhat skeptical [...] ...

I created this mindmap quite a while ago, as a follow-up to Data Container Boundaries and Complex Data Boundaries blog posts. Due to poor visualization capabilities of Freemind, I used previously, (before going with XMind), I decided to draw the mindmap manually, in MS Paint. That took me loooong time but I liked the result. Although, now I would write the [...] ...

A couple of things I have to say about this poster – a failure delivering the message and a fallacy of the concept. Delivering a message Pictures talk louder than words. Despite of an effort to show people jumping high in excitement we can actually see people brought down on their knees, surrendering some papers. [...] ...

While getting ready for the Rapid Software Testing course I dedicated some time for the “homework” – studying of publicly available exploratory testing documents. And here’s my ideas on Functionality Testing. References Heuristic Test Strategy Model – Satisfice, Inc. – Designed by James Bach Michael Bolton, DevelopSense: Testers Know That Things Can Be Different ...

While getting ready for the Rapid Software Testing course I dedicated some time for the “homework” – studying of publicly available exploratory testing documents. And here’s my ideas on Claims Testing. References Heuristic Test Strategy Model – Satisfice, Inc. – Designed by James Bach Michael Bolton, DevelopSense: Testers Know That Things Can Be Different ...

The job of software testing, we know, is to provide information about the quality of a product. Many people, however, believe that the only way to get such information is to execute the software on computers, or at least review code. But such a belief is extremely limiting. Gerald Weinberg, Testing Without Testing We got [...] ...

The Mission Weekend Testing Americas session N8 was initially planned as a mini-project: explore and map the product, deliver a test plan and test results. That’s ambitious already for 90 minutes of work! However, we took that over the edge – and succeeded. Today’s session is dedicated to session-based exploratory test management. The product we [...] ...

The very format of Weekend Testing sessions assumes “quick in / quick out” engagements, and, therefore, extremely simplified missions. However, facilitators face big and complex challenges trying to cover yet another facet of testing craft. As a staging facilitator, I had a debriefing with Michael Larsen recently, and raised questions about one of the problems [...] ...

This is my second post on the testing challenge. When I was thinking of the main idea of the challenge, I thought of it as “testing the envisioned product”. Yet, while preparing for today’s post, I wanted to reference one of Michael Bolton‘s articles, about testing in retrospective, and the idea of name “testing in [...] ...