Category: Software Testing

Automate your way to ineffective testing with my twelve step program…

How to implement a company-wide test automation framework effort and fail (usually). 1. Choose your test automation tools without ever thinking about what problem you are trying to solve, or what tests are important to automate. 2. Choose the tool that will look best on your resume. Refuse to acknowledge the test results from any […]

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Five more things…

Jonathan tagged me while we were chatting, so here are my five things you may not know about me (although I know a few readers do): 1. While Jonathan has let slip that I’m a musician, he didn’t mention that I am a failed pop-star wannabe. Our band was the first signing to an Australian […]

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Come, ninja testers…

I was lucky enough to spend three days recently taking James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing course in Adelaide, as well as a personal pre-course one-on-one workout. I am a regular reader of James’ blog, have read his book, and having read through the RST course slides was really, really curious to see how the exercises […]

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Study session difficulties, or the Learning Organisation challenge

In the Yahoo group supporting Cem Kaner’s Black Box Software Testing course, Anil Soni has been describing experiences organising and leading internal training, using the BBST course materials. One point in particular caught my attention: > The major challenge is to have all the testers together in the same time > needed for the group […]

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Thinking tools

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 […]

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The simple things in life…

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 […]

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Software testing in Korea

While I wasn’t able to find out much about Korean software testing as a whole, one of the cool things about attending the Korean Games conference was a chance to pick up some Korean testing vocabulary. Here are today’s words – 검증 (Geom-jeung) – Verification 추적 (Chu-jeok) – Tracking 지원 (Ji-won) – Support 가능성/가능 테스트 […]

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Back from Korea

I know I don’t write that frequently, but I have an excuse for the extended break this time – a five week visit to South Korea. I had thought about advertising my absence, but it occurred to me that if there is some criminally minded person paying attention to my blog, they could quite easily […]

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Today's testing heuristic – SEP

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 […]

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