Category: Modelling skills
Tools for thinking about context – Agile sliders reimagined
June 3, 2016
Philosophically, I’m aligned to the context-driven testing view of the world. Largely, this is influenced by a very early awareness of contextual factors to success in my first job, and the wild difference between games testing and corporate testing roles that I had. Since 2003, the work of the context-driven school founders has been a […]
Thinking about Test Strategy – A mnemonic device
July 21, 2009
I’ve recently been on the move a little, and have had a lot of chances to work on test strategy. I generally have historical documents to work from, but decided I should try to come up with a mnemonic device to ensure that I have all of the critical conversations that I need. One of […]
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.
Investing for maintenance – Tradeoffs and calculations
January 10, 2007
In the context-driven software testing Yahoo group, there has been an interesting thread on magic numbers. Part of this discussion related to magic numbers for software maintenance investment. While I think you can find plenty of literature that advises a bias towards maintenance, my friend Michael couldn’t find any models that satisfied our burning questions, […]
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 […]
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 […]