The question periodically comes up as to what the difference is between “Quality Assurance” and “Testing.” And a disturbingly large number of test professionals will say that “Testing is a subset of quality assurance.” This is a terrible response. Let’s talk about that.
Author: Jeff Nyman
Anything I put here is an approximation of the truth. You're getting a particular view of myself ... and it's the view I'm choosing to present to you. If you've never met me before in person, please realize I'm not the same in person as I am in writing. That's because I can only put part of myself down into words.
If you have met me before in person then I'd ask you to consider that the view you've formed that way and the view you come to by reading what I say here may, in fact, both be true. I'd advise that you not automatically discard either viewpoint when they conflict or accept either as truth when they agree.
Solution Development in Python, Part 3
This post continues on from part 2. If you’ve gone through the prior posts in this series, you have a fully functioning package. Now we’ll distribute that package.
Solution Development in Python, Part 2
Continuing on from part 1, we now have a nice little package that we wrote. Let’s refine this package to be a little more in line with Python practices, add some tests (well, a test), and provide some console execution.
Solution Development in Python, Part 1
It’s been awhile since I tackled anything too traditionally “technical.” Lately I’ve encountered many testers who are interested in using Python as their ecosystem of choice for test solutions, particularly in data science or machine learning environments. So here I’ll talk about being a test solution developer in a Python context and what it means to create solutions in this ecosystem.
What If: The Test Apocalypse
Here’s an idea that I think can be interesting in terms of how you view testing (as an activity) and tests (as an artifact).
Testing As Experiments Around Project Forces
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 being a good experimenter entails is not covered. So let’s talk about that.
Continue reading Testing As Experiments Around Project Forces
Testing and Model Building
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, means establishing certain boundaries. This is a key part of how people experiment and thus of how they model … and thus of how they ultimately explain things. So let’s talk about what this has to do with testing.
The Unique Discipline of Testing
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.
Development Lessons Ported to Testing
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.
Levels of Description
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” terminology tends to suggest there is a “right” and a “wrong” when often what you have is “What makes sense in your context.” And you may have to flexibly shift between different description levels. Let’s talk about this.
Describing My Role
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 the fields of testing and quality assurance. So here I’ll provide the answer I gave, along with a bit of context for it.
Exploration – Testing and Checking
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 post to reinforce a few things I talked about last year.
Interactive Exploration – Buying
This post follows on immediately from the last one, so let’s get started with the exploration!
Interactive Exploration – Engaging With Ideas
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 the central idea, and figure out how you would ultimately craft tests.
Continue reading Interactive Exploration – Engaging With Ideas
Exploration, Requirements, and Computation
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.
Interactive Exploration – Photographing
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 fiction.
Exploratory Testing with Interactive Fiction
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 testers and even a little bit about reframing interviews with gamification in this context. I want to start taking this to the next level.
Continue reading Exploratory Testing with Interactive Fiction
My Future in Testing
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 these provided my focus as I find myself on the doorstep of 2017.
Testing and the Nature of Time
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 plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.” Beyond those sentiments, time is also what provides us with a keen notion of polarity, by providing two aspects around the project singularity I talked about. So let’s talk about polarities and time and see if we can’t make this relevant to testing as a discipline.
Testing Is Like Studying the Past
I was going to title this post “Testing is Like Archaeology.” Then I was thinking of “Testing is Like Geology.” But then I realized, as my argument took shape, that I could have said testing was like paleontology, or geomorphology, or even biography. I realized then that what I really wanted to focus on was how testing was, oftentimes, about studying the past. But to drive that argument home, let’s consider why we study the past. And let’s also consider why such study informs the future.