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Scenarios Ain’t Just Use Cases

How do people use a software product? Some development groups model use through use cases. Typically use cases are expressed in terms of the user performing a set of step-by-step behaviours: 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, then 5. In those groups, testers may create test cases that map directly onto the use cases. Sometimes, that gets called a scenario, and the testing of it is called a scenario … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (19): Testing By Percentages

Every now and then, in some forum or another, someone says something like “75% of the testing done on an Agile project is done by automation”. Whatever else might be wrong with that statement, it’s a very strange way to describe a complex, cognitive process of learning about a product through experimentation, and seeking to find problems that threaten the value of the product, the project, or the business. Perhaps … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (18): Ask for Testability

Whether you’re working in an Agile environment or not, one of the tester’s most important tasks is to ask and advocate for things that make a product more testable. Where to start? Think about visibility—in its simplest form, log files—and controllability in the form of scriptable application programming interfaces (APIs). Logs aren’t just for troubleshooting. Comprehensive log files can help to identify the data that was processed and the functions … Read more