Last time out, I was responding to a coaching client, a tester who was working in an organization fixated on test cases. Here, I’ll call her Frieda. She had some more questions about how to respond to her managers. What if they want another tester to do your tests if you are not available? “‘Your tests’, or ‘your testing’?”, I asked. From what I’ve heard, your tests. I don’t agree … Read more
Recently, during a coaching session, a tester was wrestling with something that was a mystery to her. She asked: Why do some tech leaders (for example, CTOs, development managers, test managers, and test leads) jump straight to test cases when they want to provide traceability, share testing efforts with stakeholders, and share feature knowledge with testers? I’m not sure. I fear that most of the time, fixation on test cases … Read more
Vipul Kocher is a fellow whom I have known for a long time. I think we met in North America in the mid 2000s. I know I visited his company in Noida, New Delhi about 15 years ago, and spoke with his testers for an hour or so. On that occasion, I also visited his family and had a memorable home-cooked meal, followed by a mad dash in a sport … Read more
Formal testing is testing that must be done in a specific way, or to check specific facts. In the Rapid Software Testing methodology, we map the formality of testing on a continuum. Sometimes it’s important to do testing in a formal way, and sometimes it’s not so important. From Rapid Software Testing. See http://www.satisfice.com/rst.pdf People sometimes tell me that they must test their software using a particular formal approach—for example, … Read more
The other day on Twitter, Cory Foy tweeted a challenge: “Having a QA department is a sign of incompetency in your Development department. Discuss.” Here’s what I think: I’m a tester, and it’s time for our craft to grow up. Whatever the organizational structure of our development shops, it’s time for us testers to get out of the Quality Assurance business. In the fall of 2008, I was at the … Read more
A tester asks… How do we handle production bugs? When management asks “Did you test this?”. how do I respond? When management asks “Why didn’t you find that bug?”, the first step is to accept in your own mind responsibility for looking for bugs, but not a commitment to finding every bug. The latter is a great aspiration, but an unreasonable commitment, and management shouldn’t be holding you to it. … Read more
A tester recently asked “If you’re asked to write a ‘test plan’ for a new feature before development starts, what type of thing do you produce?” I answered that I would produce a reply: “I’d be happy to do that. What would you like to see in this test plan?” The manager’s reply was, apparently, “test cases covering all edge cases we’ll need to test”. That’s a pretty naïve request. … Read more