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Versus != Opposite

Dale Emery, a colleague for whom we have great respect, submitted a comment on my last blog post, which in turn referred to Testing and Checking Refined on James Bach‘s blog. Dale says: I don’t see the link between your goals and your solution. Your solution seems to be (a) distinguishing what you call checking from what you call testing, (b) using the terms “checking” and “testing” to express the … Read more

On Testing and Checking Refined

Over the last few months, and especially during some face-to-face time that we had in England recently, James Bach and I have been working to sharpen our notions of testing and checking. Although the task had been on the list for some time, we didn’t get a sense of great urgency about it until we were surprised recently to find that, at a very subtle but important level, we meant … Read more

Severity vs. Priority

Another day has dawned on Planet Earth, so another tester has used LinkedIn to ask about the difference between severity and priority. The reason the tester is asking is, probably, that there’s a development project, and there’s probably a bug tracking system, and it probably contains fields for both severity and priority (and probably as numbers). The tester has probably been told to fill in each field as part of … Read more

Why Would a User Do THAT?

If you’ve been in testing for long enough, you’ll eventually report or demonstrate a problem, and you’ll hear this: “No user would ever do that.” Translated into English, that means “No user that I’ve thought of, and that I like, would do that on purpose, or in a way that I’ve imagined.” So here are a few ideas that might help to spur imagination. The user made a simple mistake, … Read more