Month: January 2012

Published inThinking

Test Teams Need Inventors: Seeing and Thinking Differently

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In various posts I’ve tried to show how I believe testers can invent solutions to problems they are encountering. These solutions do not always have to be tool-based in nature. Sometimes you are presenting a new way of thinking about processes, sometimes you are reframing problems, sometimes you a providing a hopeful vision, sometimes you are in fact coming up with ad-hoc tools, and sometimes you are coming up with new techniques. At the core of this, however, is thinking about problems and thinking about solutions. It’s about being an inventor.

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Published inCommunication

Cars, Shapes, and Tests

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I think the future of testing relies less on a sole focus on test execution and more on the ability to write tests in the language of the business domain, effectively tying together the role of business analyst and tester. I think that future also includes the ability of testers to instrument certain artifacts, like requirements documents, so that the requirements, acting as tests, can be converted to different formats, most notably automated tests. There’s a lot of contention out there around these ideas from “purist” testers: those who feel that these attempts provide a single-source test format is getting away from testing and more into development.

While I agree in part that this is putting some focus on development activities, I disagree that this gets away from testing. Effective testing, to me, is about putting testing where it will do the most good in the most responsible fashion. Sometimes that testing is finding new bugs, sometimes it’s providing confidence that bugs haven’t come back. Either way, testing is all about communication.

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Published inThinking

Epistemological Angst (or When Does “Before” Lose Meaning?)

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I find myself in a philosophical mood today and it’s based on some experiences with testers that simply don’t ask questions. As testers we have to ask questions. Lots of questions. We also have to recognize when we are getting answers. Sometimes, however, we have to realize that sometimes answers aren’t that easy to come by. And here I’m not just talking about the idea that no one has the answers. What about when answers just aren’t possible at all? Can that happen? Of course it can. It depends on the types of questions being asked and the context in which answers are expected. (See my time travel post for one example of this.)

So — just bear with me here — I want every tester out there to consider a question: what existed before the big bang?

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Published inBDDTesting

Testing’s Brave New World

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As a tester you will often encounter environments that desire to practice some form of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and testing practices must fit within that. The term “BDD” may be used more or less vaguely. One thing that’s often somewhat common is that people will start to promote so-called “BDD tools.” Examples here would be tools like Cucumber, Spinach, Turnip, SpecFlow, Behat, Lettuce, and so forth. These tools all ask you to adhere to some sort of organization based on terms like “feature”, “story”, “scenario” and so on. What this often ends up doing is totally missing the point.

But what is the point?

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