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How Long Will the Testing Take?

Today yet another tester asked “When a client asks ‘How long will the testing take for our development project?’, how should I reply?” The simplest answer I can offer is this: if you’re testing as part of a development project, testing will take exactly as long as development will take. That’s because effective, efficient testing is not separate from development; it is woven into development. When we develop a software … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (35): Make Things Visible

I hear a lot from testers who discover problems late in development, and who get grief for bringing them up. On one level, the complaints are baseless, like holding an investigate journalist responsible for a corrupt government. On the other hand, there’s a way for testers to anticipate bad news and reduce the surprises. Try producing a product coverage outline and a risk list. A product coverage outline is an … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (34): Checking Inside Exploration

Some might believe that checking and exploratory work are antithetical. Not so. In our definition, checking is “the algorithmic process of operating and observing a product, applying decision rules to those observations, and reporting the outcome of those decision rules”. We might want to use some routine checks, but not all checks have to be rote. We can harness algorithms and tools to induce variation that can help us find … Read more