Effective Tests, Not Positive and Negative Tests

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 5 May 2012

My opinion is that the “positive” and “negative” distinctions for tests are a faulty conceptual distinction. To me, only “old school” testers talk about “positive testing” and “negative testing.” Pretty bluntly stated, huh? I feel strongly about this because the way the terms are promoted, they take focus away from how a tester should be thinking about testing. That’s my belief anyway. I’ll try to defend that.

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Testers Write Tools — Like Test Libraries!

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 15 April 2012

I keep looking for ways to get junior testers up to speed on writing test frameworks and test libraries. It’s a very good skill to have and it’s one that’s in demand. Beyond that, I think it paves the way for helping testing to evolve into what it must become: a group of practitioners that are test solution developers. As such, I’ve been using my Symbiont library for this purpose.

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Symbiont Generators and Web Objects

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 15 March 2012

Symbiont is a little further along, enough so that it makes sense to look at the basic idea of what it means to provide a façade over two tools. The focus here is really just to show you some tool construction from the ground up. This may help you understand tools like page-object or watir-page-helper a little bit or they may spur on your own creative efforts as you build your own tools.

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Rise of the Symbiont

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 2 March 2012

Lately I have been developing lots of test solutions, most of them having to do with automated testing. I originally developed a library that I called Lucid. This was in turn based on a library I was originally calling Terminus. Now I’m trying to distill a lot of what have learned into a library that I’m calling Symbiont.

I’ll be perfectly honest: what I’m writing here is largely for my own benefit as I get my thoughts in order, but I do have hopes for Symbiont to be something useful. So I will document its development path here and if someone besides me finds anything of interest in it, that’s great.

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Tests as Specifications

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 22 February 2012

In Testing’s Brave New World, I ended up talking about BDD and the concepts that testing, acting as a design activity, has to work within. That was a post fairly heavy on nomenclature concerns. I sort of skirted around the issue that it’s the tools we use in our BDD type activities that are often forcing us to consider this terminology. Even if you are not using a specific tool, but rather a technique like spec workshops — which is a “BDD activity” — you are still wrestling with these terms.

So let’s put this in some context.

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Test Writers Step in Early

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 16 February 2012

In my last post about what tests are for I talked a bit about the ability of test writers to be nimble in terms of getting quality-focused information — usually as a result collaborative discussions — encoded into readable tests that focus on intent rather than implementation. All of that’s easy to say but test writers sometimes have a hard time figuring out how to exactly do it in the context of the collaboration possibilities in their environment. Here I want to talk a little about the core ideas, backing them up with an example.

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Posted in Quality Assurance, Testing | 1 Comment

What Are Your Tests For?

by Jeff Nyman Posted on 14 February 2012

A key question to ask is what you want to get out of your tests. I’ve already talked about how I think the purpose of testing is to find information and then communicate that information. That’s great and all … but … what do you actually want to get out of the tests themselves? The way you answer that question will shape your testing function to a large extent, particularly when it comes to picking supporting tools, such as for test management or test automation.

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Posted in Testing | 1 Comment