Uncategorized

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. Confucius, Analects There are lots of problems in software development, but one of the bigger ones is muddled process talk that leads to muddled process thinking. An email arrived in my inbox, touting an article titled The Shift-Left Approach to Software Testing. As it turns out, the article was written it 2018, and the source … Read more

A tester writes: “I’m testing an API. It accepts various settings and parameters. I don’t know how to get access to these settings from the API itself, so I’m stuck with modifying them from the front end. Moreover, some responses to specific requests are long and complicated, so given that, I have no idea how to test it! Online examples of API testing tend to focus on checking the response’s … Read more

I noticed something interesting while reviewing my credit card bills a couple of evenings ago: monthly charges for $9.99 from “Amazon Downloads”, going back several months. I buy a lot of e-books. I looked for receipts from Amazon in email. I found a bunch, but none from Amazon for $9.99. I never delete email receipts; I put all of them into a separate folder so that I can collate them … Read more

For testers who are being asked to focus on test cases and testing tools, remember this: a test case never finds a bug. The tester finds a bug, and the test case may play a role in finding the bug. (Credit to Pradeep Soundararajan for putting this so succinctly, all those years ago.) Similarly, an automated check never finds a bug. The tester finds a bug, and the check may … Read more

The expression “flaky tests” is evidence of flaky testing. No scientist refers to “flaky experimental results”. Scientists who observe inconsistency don’t dismiss it. They pay close attention to it, and probe it. They redesign their experiments or put better controls on them. When someone refers to an automated check (or a suite of them) as a “flaky test”, the suggestion is that it represents an unreliable experiment. That assumption is … Read more

I’m testing a test tool at the moment. I’m investigating it for a talk. The producers of the tool claim to have hundreds of thousands of users. A few positive remarks appear in a scrolling widget on the product’s web site from people purported to be users. Me, I can’t make head or tail of the product. It doesn’t seem to do what it’s supposed to do. It looks like … Read more

A while back, a tester brought a patient in for treatment. It wasn’t a human patient; it was a sentence about building and testing in an organization. The tester asked me for help. “Could you provide me with a first aid kit for this statement that came from my management?” “We have to move on to DevOps to be able to release code more often but we also have to … Read more

One problem that we face in software development and testing is that data and information aren’t the same. Here’s an example, prompted by email from a correspondent. There’s a Rapid Software Testing Explored class running January 11-14, 2021. It’s set to run at times that work for people in Europe and the UK, mostly. The service I use for managing registrations, Eventbrite, offers the opportunity to list the starting and … Read more

This is your periodic reminder that data has problems, just like code does. A correspondent on LinkedIn pointed me towards a book by George Lakoff, an author I admire. For some reason, I had not been aware of the book. So I looked it up. I wanted to go straight to it, so I put the title in quotes: Hmmm. That’s a little strange. Nothing? Let’s try without the quotes. … Read more