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A New Agile Testing Ecosystem

A New Agile Testing Ecosystem – EuroSTAR – Michael Bolton

Over the last several years, a set of ideas and activities have been dumped into a steamer trunk called Agile software development. Agile development has hit mainstream recognition, even though there is often uncertainty and turmoil around what “Agile development” means, in theory and in practice—and that uncertainty and turmoil affects Agile projects and the people in them.

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Very Short Blog Posts (26): You Don’t Need Acceptance Criteria to Test

You do not need acceptance criteria to test. Reporters do not need acceptance criteria to investigate and report stories; scientists do not need acceptance criteria to study and learn about things; and you do not need acceptance criteria to explore something, to experiment with it, to learn about it, or to provide a description of it. You could use explicit acceptance criteria as a focusing heuristic, to help direct your … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (25): Testers Don’t Break the Software

Plenty of testers claim that they break the software. They don’t really do that, of course. Software doesn’t break; it simply does what it has been designed and coded to do, for better or for worse. Testers investigate systems, looking at what the system does; discovering and reporting on where and how the software is broken; identifying when the system will fail under load or stress. It might be a … Read more

Give Us Back Our Testing

“Program testing involves the execution of a program over sample test data followed by analysis of the output. Different kinds of test output can be generated. It may consist of final values of program output variables or of intermediate traces of selected variables. It may also consist of timing information, as in real time systems. “The use of testing requires the existence of an external mechanism which can be used … Read more

Very Short Blog Posts (24): You Are Not a Bureaucrat

Here’s a pattern I see fairly often at the end of bug reports: Expected: “Total” field should update and display correct result. Actual: “Total” field updates and displays incorrect result. Come on. When you write a report like that, can you blame people for thinking you’re a little slow? Or that you’re a bureaucrat, and that testing work is mindless paperwork and form-filling? Or perhaps that you’re being condescending? It … Read more

The Rapid Software Testing Namespace

Just as no one has the right to tell you what language to speak at home, nobody outside of your project has the authority to tell you how to speak inside your project. Every project develops its own namespace, so to speak, and its own formal or informal criteria for naming things inside it. Rapid Software Testing is, among other things, a project in that sense. For years, James Bach … Read more