Category Archives: Context-driven Testing

GATE No. 2: A transpection report

Two weeks ago the second GATE workshop took place in our offices in Munich. Unfortunately some of the participants couldn’t make it. So, there were the three of us, Meike Mertsch, Alexander Simic, and myself. Although we were a bit low on energy in the morning, the day turned out to be a wholesome day of transpection – or if you prefer, we did a lot of test chat. Here’s what still sticks with me from the day.

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ALE2012 Lookback

It has been about three weeks right now since the second Agile Lean Europe in Barcelona. Although I had the best intentions back then, I promised to write a blog entry about my experiences there, I didn’t do it until now. It seems the best stuff I take away from the break-out conversations in the coffee breaks these days when at conferences, not so much from the session itself. This also holds for the ALE 2012.

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Trip report from the Ukrainian Testing Days

Last weekend I was invited to Odessa, Ukraine for the Ukrainian Testing Days, a conference that Andrii Dzynia co-organized. Andrii has organized public testing dojos in the Ukraine in the past. He asked me to put the reports from their sessions on my blog in an English translation. I think he does great work there for the Ukrainian community. So, I was eager to see that community in action. I had a pleasant trip, staying in Odessa was very comfortable to me, especially since Julia Cherniak dropped me from the airport, and led me around in town on the first day. Here is a full report from my roughly two days in the Ukraine.

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My future wishes for software testing

Huib Schoots approached me late last year regarding some contribution for the TestNet Jubilee book he was putting together. The title of the book is “The Future of Software Testing”. I submitted something far too long, so that most of it fell for the copy-editing process. However, I wanted to share my original thoughts as well. So, here they are – disclaimer: they might be outdated right now.

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The Testing Quadrants – We got it wrong!

The Testing Quadrants continue to be a source of confusion. I heard that Brian Marick was the first to write them down after long conversations with Cem Kaner. Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory refined them in their book on Agile Testing.

I wrote earlier about my experiences with the testing quadrants in training situations a while back. One pattern that keeps on re-occurring when I run this particular exercise is that teams new to agile software development – especially the testers – don’t know which testing techniques to put in the quadrant with the business-facing tests that shall support the team. All there is, it seems, for them is critique to the product. This kept on confusing me, since I think us testers can bring great value. Recently I had an insight motivated by Elisabeth Hendrickson’s keynote at CAST 2012.

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Actually, there are best practices

A while back I ranted about best practices. Among the things I found in that particular blog entry is that there are quite some definitions for the term “best practice” out there. Nowadays, if it’s not on google, then it doesn’t exist. For best practices google it turns out is quite capable of delivering a definition. Although I resonate with the principles of context-driven testing, I recently found the second principle unhelpful. The second principle states

There are good practices in context, but there are no best practices.

Like many other people that I respect I used to start ranting about best practices whenever people would ask for them. Particularly in training situations, though this does not help so much. J.B. Rainsberger‘s introduction to the Satir Communication Model helped me understand why that is.

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How would you test this: Passenger Airline System

This is an experience report that falls in many categories at the same time. I think the most remarkable one is the personal fail category (hooray, I learned something!).

As a consultant I do some fair amount of traveling. Most of the time I stay on the ground, though on my most recent trip to San Jose, CA for Test Coach Camp and CAST that was not an option. So, while lying jetlagged in the hotel room, I decided to blog about my trip here, and why I ended up testing a passenger airline system, which bugs I found, and which follow-up tests I can imagine to run from here.

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