A lot of people writing about testing draw the correlation between testing and experimenting. You’ll often hear something like “testing is evaluation through experimentation.” But, as advice to testers, this falls far short of helpful if the notion of what … Continue reading
In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb talks about “Platonicity,” which is defined as the desire to cut reality into crisp shapes. This is a form of dividing up a large domain into a smaller domain. This, by definition, … Continue reading
In my post on porting development lessons to testing I mentioned getting into the ideas of what makes the testing role something uniquely distinct from that of the development role. So let’s talk about this.
There’s often talk about how developers should think more like testers. But there’s often not as much discussion about the corollary: testers learning to think more like developers. So let’s talk about this.
I’ve talked about the notion of test description languages quite a bit. A lot of these discussions get into debates about being declarative versus imperative, or focusing on intent rather than implementation. All good things to consider. But such “versus” … Continue reading
Recently I engaged in a fun exercise with a test team wherein each of us had to answer the following question: How do I describe my role? It’s always interesting to me to see how people answer this, particularly in … Continue reading
In this post I want to follow on a bit from the interactive exploration idea developed up to this point but also focus on the distinction of checking and testing that often gets debated. I also want to use this … Continue reading
This post follows on immediately from the last one, so let’s get started with the exploration!
Let’s continue our interactive exploration example. Here I’m going to provide a bit more of a complex scenario for you to consider. My hope is that you will take the time to engage with this idea, exploring the ideas around … Continue reading
Let’s use this post to take stock of what I’ve done so far in the interactive series but also talk a bit about exploration as a core technique of testing, particularly around the idea of requirements.
This is the second post in the interactive exploratory testing series. The first post provided a relatively large amount of context as well as ending with a challenge. So let’s continue to explore this idea of exploratory testing with interactive … Continue reading
I want to start off 2017 by playing around with the idea of exploration. I gave an example of how I applied exploration while testing a particular game as well as creating a game to test the exploratory abilities of … Continue reading
I had two major series of thematic posts that I tried out this year: Modern Testing and Indefinito. The former was eminently focused on the tactical and the latter more on the strategic and perhaps even philosophical. In some ways … Continue reading
To quote Doctor Tolian Soran, the villain in Star Trek: Generations, “time is the fire in which we burn.” In a little less fictional of a context, the historian Robert Bloch has said of time that “it is the very … Continue reading
