Category Archives: Testing

Software Testing

Leadership, Testing

Going for the board

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Several years ago, my parents send me to a local swimming club in order to learn and practice swimming. I started learning the different techniques: breast stroke, back stroke, crawlng, and butterfly. I exercised, and attended competitions. Skip forward ten years, and as a teenager I become distracted enough to give up that sport.

At a particular down I made the decision to stop swimming.

But I felt like I needed to give something back to the community that was a major part of my life so far, that made me grow, that most of my friends were a piece of.

That’s when I decided to become a swimming trainer alongside with giving back my time to the youth to come. I started as organizer of youth events, became a secretary, joined the local outdoor swimming pool community, organized trips, competitions, and dedicated lots of my time.

More than 15 years later, together with a move in jobs, I had to give that up. I never regretted the time I dedicated. I loved being part of that, I loved being part of the different boards that I was on (3 at the same time for some years). If I happen to change jobs again, I will probably consider going back.

Although, right now, the testing community to me has become a second community that I feel I need to give something back. The couple of past years, I learned so much from other people. Then there also were those folks that did the dirt-work in the back. For several years, I have been glad to have these gals and guys, sometimes without knowing it. I feel I need to give something back.

I am going for the board of directors for the AST. The elections are open right now. I want to give something back.

But what? Based on my background, I am considering the position of the secretary. I also would like to help bring an AST-sponsored event to Europe, and finally bridge the ocean from the States. I am quite certain if I become elected, I need to find out more, and I will find out more, and refine my role on the board, so I try to not make up too many promises at this point.

If you feel I can be of service on the board, (and are a member of the AST) I would be grateful if you vote for me. You will find details in your mail that you received for the elections.

Context-driven Testing, Testing

Pro-rating Testing Challenge

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I am currently reviewing a book on domain testing. While doing that I realized I can put up a testing challenge based on what I annoyed my colleagues with a few years back. I disabled comments on this post in order not to spoilt future visitors of my blog. You will have to find another way to respond to this.

Imagine a service which is rated on a monthly basis like Spotify, Watchever (they don’t pay me for writing this blog), pay-TV, phone lines, or mobile phones. Usually that means that you have a fixed monthly rate.

Now, the business prescribe that you have a monthly fee that you need to pay. For example for Spotify premium this is 9.99 EUR, and something else for some other service. The business rules also provide that you can cancel this service mid-month before payment. Then you will be charged only the pro-rated amount of the monthly fee for the current month. For example, if the payment period starts on the 1st of the month, and you cancel the service on the 3rd of the month on a 30 day month, you will only pay 2/30th of the monthly fee for the final month.

Unfortunately we deal with a larger system. In that system the pro-rating is transporting from the domain subsystem to the billing subsystem via the percentage of the prorating. That means that for the above scenario we will trigger some process on the billing backend with 1/15th in percent, yielding 6,666666666667 percent. The value used here is a double-precision floating point value.

Analyze this program (consisting of both subsystems) for interesting variables, what could go wrong, and how would you test it?

Context-driven Testing, Testing

Where are the German testers?

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On the bottom of James Bach’s recommendations of people there is a small paragraph:

That One German Guy

Germany has no excuse. There are TONS of smart people there. How is it only one intellectual software tester has emerged from the ISTQB-addled masses to demand my respect with his work? My theory is that Germany has a more command-and-control culture, which perhaps disparages independent thought of the kind required to achieve excellence in testing. This pains me, because I am descended from Germans and I would love to visit and teach there.

Anyway, the one German guy who shines in my community is Markus Gaertner. I’ll do a write-up on him, shortly.

Yeah, it’s about me. From time to time I am asked by James and other people in our community where the German testers actually are. Here are some folks I am in touch with, that have raised my attention, and I think will need some attention from the wider community. There is not only one guy testing in Germany, seriously.

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Agile Testing, Context-driven Testing, Exploratory Testing, Test Driven Development

Automated vs. exploratory – we got it wrong!

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There is a misconception floating around that Agile Testing is mostly about automated checking. On the other way the whole testing community fights since decades about the value of test automation vs. the value of exploratory testing. I find these two different extreme position unhelpful to do any constructive testing. Most recently I ended up with a model that explains the underlying dynamics quite well, to testers, to programmers, and to their managers. Here’s the model.

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Leadership, Methodologies, Testing

Conferencers anonymous

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I have a confession to make: I am addicted. In this blog entry I would like to warn you about it, so you don’t go the same route down as I did. Don’t follow me on that path, even if the temptation looks promising and convincing.

You don’t have a clue what I am talking about? I talking about conferences. I am addicted to them. In this blog entry I would like to foster my coming-out, and provide the things that make me addicted. Don’t fool yourself that you won’t become addicted. Stay away from conferences! Don’t go there!

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Agile Testing, Context-driven Testing, Testing

Software Testing is not a commodity!

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Stick in software testing long enough, and you will see enough ideas come and go to be able to sort out the ones that look promising to work, and the ones that you just hope will go away soon enough so that no manager will pay any of her attention to it. There have been quite a few in the history of software testing, and from my experience the worst things started to happen every time when someone tried to replace a skilled tester with some piece of automation – whether that particular automation was a tool-based approach or some sort of scripted testing approach. A while ago, Jerry Weinberg described the problem in the following way:

When managers don’t understand the work, they tend to reward the appearance of work. (long hours, piles of paper, …)

The tragic thing is when this also holds true for the art of discovering the information about how usable a given piece of software is.

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Agile Testing, Context-driven Testing, Exploratory Testing, Testing

The Three Ages in Testing

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On my way back from the Agile Practitioners Conference 2013 in Tel Aviv, Isreal I digest lots of information and bar discussion content. After attending Dan North‘s tutorial on Tuesday, I have six sheets of paper on notes with me, that will probably fill my writing buffer for the next half year. Time to get started. Here I connect Dan’s model of the Three Ages to Software Testing.

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Retrospectives, Testing

2012 retrospective – Addendum: The articles

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Happy New Year!

I was not going to blog about this, but it turns out that this twitter conversation between Lisa Crispin and Meike Mertsch prompted me to it. So, here are the articles I wrote in 2012. Since I write in two languages, I decided to separate them between my English and German articles. I also try to just mention the ones that were published in 2012, not necessarily written.

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Agile Testing, FitNesse

What’s next in FitNesse?

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The other day I was going through the first few drafts of the German translation of ATDD by Example – A practical guide to Acceptance Test-driven Development. Since some days I had been watching the list of issues that Dan Woodward and Arjan Molenaar were heavily working on some updated to the UI system, and FitNesse in general. Then Mike Scott told me that he just did a presentation at the Agile Testing Days, and used the recent version of FitNesse from the CI-server – and it looked awesome. Putting all together I decided to use new screenshots from FitNesse in the German translation. Until I get to update the English version of the book, here are some screenshots for the next version, which should be officially announced within the next week or so.

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