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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Models of software development

After an email exchange with Matt Heusser, Matt has posted my comments on how our work tools sometimes influence our behaviour on projects. That’s because these work tools are based on models of how someone believe software should be developed. Perhaps more importantly, the tools that I’ve seen are usually designed to ensure that the […]

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Investing for maintenance – Tradeoffs and calculations

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, […]

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Community Service Announcement – Illiteration/Alliteration

Looking at the search engine strings used to get to my site, I just wanted to point out that for some of you, the word you are looking for is ‘Alliteration’. From Wikipedia – “Alliteration is a stylistic device, or literary technique, in which successive words (more strictly, stressed syllables) begin with the same consonant […]

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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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Small things…

I helped save a life yesterday. It was only a small one, but I felt quite warm and fuzzy anyway… Perspective is good.

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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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