Category: Analysis skills
Every tester needs a healthy dose of paranoia
October 3, 2007
I wonder if Google testers think like this? http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_fiction_evil_dangerous_surveillance_control_1.php
The Egg testing challenge, context and mission
August 17, 2007
Matt Heusser is describing his challenge to test various inanimate objects – An egg, a stapler, a salt shaker and a knife. Read it here, but be sure to come back for the rest of the problem. I’d now like you to spend a few minutes thinking about how you might go about testing an […]
Requirements analysis thought process walkthrough…
March 28, 2007
Michael has moved to a new city, and is obviously free of social distractions. That, or there’s something physically stopping him from playing World of Warcraft. Anyway, he’s blogging again and his latest entry (http://www.ruschena.org/michael/?p=107) on writing technical requirements is well worth a read.
Thinking tools
December 27, 2006
While looking for advice on improving my critical thinking, I came across this article – http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~ctwardy/Papers/reasonpaper.pdf Interestingly, there are a bunch of tools listed here that claim to help with the technique of argument mapping. I haven’t had a chance to try any of these yet. Hopefully, encouraging others to check them out will yield […]
The simple things in life…
November 27, 2006
Does your system accept real world data? Does it restrict the lengths of fields and/or prevent certain characters from being entered? How do you know when you are allowing the right kinds of data? While chatting with colleagues about the NOTAG bug and some of the features of the system we are working on (it […]
Today's testing heuristic – SEP
September 15, 2006
Having seen a number of testers posting their heuristics on Testing reflections, I thought I might chime in with one that popped into my head. I’m calling it the SEP heuristic, which is probably all you need to know about it if you are familiar with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books. It is simply this […]
Rolling your own methodology
August 14, 2006
I came across someone asking for an answer to the old “How do you test a stapler” question, and in light of my new role, I thought this was a good opportunity to start taking up James Bach’s methodology challenge, using the stapler example as a starting point. I’m starting with the meta-questions, those which […]
Personas, substruction and other trades’ tricks
July 30, 2006
Developing personas is a well-described technique (see Alan Cooper’s ‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum’ and Mike Cohn’s ‘User Stories Applied’) for considering the different kinds of users of the system we are developing. On a recent project, we began considering the different users who might want to user our product. In the process, I […]