DevelopsenseLogo

Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them

In the testing business, we’ve been wrestling with the measurement problem for quite a while. I think there are two prongs to the problem. The first is the aphorism that “you can’t control what you can’t measure”. The second is the confusion between measurement (which can be either quantitative or qualitative) and metrics, which are mathematical functions of measurements, and therefore fundamentally quantitative, only quantitative. I don’t know if you … Read more

Testability

On Twitter, Kindly Reader @jrl7 (in real life, John Lambert at Microsoft) asks “Is there an example of testability that doesn’t involve improving ability to automate? (improved specs?)“. (Update, June 5 2014: For a fast and updated answer, see Heuristics of Software Testability.) Yup. If testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it, then testability is anything that makes it easier to question or evaluate that product. So … Read more