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 [...] ...

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 [...] ...

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 [...] ...

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. [...] ...

Quality is value to some person. Gerald Weinberg The story began when I received a new chequebook. Every bank, especially any of top 5 banks [in Canada], has a lot of claims about how much quality matters to them, and how much they care about their customers. Since I was not satisfied by a quality [...] ...

What, you didn't know that printer does not support mark-up characters? ...

With this post I continue my examples on Bounded Awareness in software testing. But, again, first I ask you to read the following article: “Multi-tasking makes you stupid”. If you didn’t, here’s the summary. A growing body of scientific research shows one of the jugglers’ favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you less efficient [...] ...

Last week I asked QuickTestingTips readers to share examples of Bounded Awareness they observed in their work, and here I’m with my stories. Let’s start with this video. You see two teams of people playing basketball. While you watch the video, count number of passes made by the each team. ..Now, after you’re done, list what [...] ...

If I would have to choose to keep only one of my answers on StackOverflow, I’d choose this one.  Probably, not necessary explanation On a technical side, what is the greatest test automation challenge? It’s not programming, and not even learning about tool’s object model or application’s API. But it’s two-fold. 1. Automated test design [...] ...

Software Engineering Explained Software Development Waist Line ...

You must unlearn what you have learned. Master Yoda to Luke Skywalker Although Unlearning is not a testing heuristic itself, I found it very helpful in many activities – from testing and test automation to problem solving and management. That is why I wrote about Unlearning on quicktestingtips.com. Yet I wanted to share even more [...] ...

A few facts to now Most of cell phones now come with a built-in GPS receiver hardware unit and GPS tracking software module. Basically, you can assume that any smart phone whether it’s Blackberry, iPhone, or Nokia, (or whatever) model has it, and it’s turned ON by default. A GPS tracking equipped cell phone can precisely [...] ...

Hospital error leads to radiation overdoses The article: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cedars13-2009oct13,0,1200257.story (…) Doctors believed it would provide them more useful data to analyze disruptions in the flow of blood to brain tissue. That meant resetting the machine to override the pre-programmed instructions that came with the scanner when it was installed. “There was a misunderstanding about an [...] ...

The story Maybe the story began when I noticed that a status message (a line displaying text at the bottom of the window) looked somewhat unusual. Or maybe when I checked the log file to investigate, and found out that the program reported “______ file updated”. That looked as a typo, or unsupported characters in the [...] ...

Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident  More often than other developers, about incidents hear product managers, customer support techs, and product support programmers – whenever an end-user experienced and reported a problem with the software product. However, incident is not necessary a bug. It might be caused by a variety of reasons, like following: Configuration [...] ...

Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident  The notable comment about word “issue” used in software testing context is that it’s often referred as a problem or an obstacle – which is uncommon meaning.  Generally, an issue is defined as “something that is sent out or put forth in any form” (Dictionary.com). Wikipedia explains this discrepancy with [...] ...

Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident  Let’s start from definitions. A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program or system that produces an incorrect or unexpected result, or causes it to behave in unintended ways. Wikipedia.org “An unwanted and unintended property of [...] ...

Reference page: Error, Bug, Issue, Incident Let’s start from definition. “Error – a deviation from accuracy or correctness; a mistake, as in action or speech.” Dictionary.com Indeed, in the most circumstances when it was referred as “error” it was a mistake, as in the examples below. Typo, or syntax error in the programming code Logical [...] ...

“We have a build error…”, “You need to investigate that incident…”, “Today I fixed two bugs…”, “We already saw this issue in the last release…”. Are you used to hearing that? Have you ever wondered why there are so many words used talking about software problems? So did I. Looking back to my 15 years being in [...] ...