The first and second posts in this series were about one person occupying two roles on the same project, sometimes switching between them within a single bit of work. That’s interleaving, and it works because the switch is cheap: same person, same context, same code sitting right there to look at. But most of the testing world doesn’t look like that. Most of it looks like two different people, on two different sides of a task, who never actually swap seats. I want to look at what “the role, not the person” demands in that arrangement: not interleaving so much, but cooperation. And I want to do it with something small enough to show in full.

Continue reading Testing Knowledge Isn’t (Just) a Testing Skill →

This is a follow-on to my previous post about what it looks like when a developer tests. Same project, next unit of work. So let’s dig in to some more code.

Continue reading Tests Live on the Edges →

I was going to call this post “Interrogating My Own Code” but that was a bit opaque, even though it’s entirely accurate. I was then going to title it “When the Developer Is the Tester” because that’s part of what I’m talking about. But I ended up on what I believe is the more salient point.

Continue reading Testing Is a Role, Not a Person →

Awhile back I posted my call to action posts: Testers: Act Like a Developer. Since that time, I’ve done a few posts on what that looks like specifically and why it matters. This post is another one of those, showing the very early stages of a project.

Continue reading The Integration Seam →

Quality doesn’t collapse overnight. It drifts. It drifts in the seams between teams, in the silence between a feature being built and a feature being tested, in the gap between what we meant to cover and what we actually did. That drift is often invisible. Until it isn’t. That’s why testing can’t live in a corner of the organization. It has to be democratized, distributed, and deliberately practiced. And if we’re serious about doing that, we need ways to see the drift before it becomes damage. Let’s dig in!

Continue reading Guarding Quality From Drift to Discipline →

As testers, we spend much of our time reviewing requirements, specifications, and user stories. We’re looking for ambiguities, inconsistencies, and contradictions. However, these analytical muscles can be exercised anywhere, including in narrative fiction. Let’s dig in!

Continue reading Using Narratives to Sharpen Testing Skills →

Okay, I’ll admit my title is a bit of click-bait. The better title would be “Testing Has Something To Do With Paleontology” but even that would not be correct since what I really would have to say is “Testing Has Something To Do With Paleontological Debates About Mass Extinctions in the Fossil Record.” Ugh. Even worse. You know what, let’s just dig in. (Pun slightly intended.)

Continue reading Testing Has Something To Do With Mass Extinction →

I was asked what one piece advice I have that I would give to testers starting out in the industry. It had to just be one piece of advice. It’s an interesting challenge.

Continue reading The Quality Constant: Think and Act Experimentally →

You will hear a certain segment of people say things like “TDD has nothing to do with testing” or “automation has nothing to do with testing.” This is often an ill-framed argument. Let’s talk about why this matters.

Continue reading Nothing to Do with Testing? →

A lot of talk in the testing industry still focus on that divide between “automation” and “manual testing.” A lot of talk also focuses around how much and to what extent developers do testing. Here I want to provide a short post that indicates what I’ve done in my career, either as an individual contributor, a manager of teams, or a director.

Continue reading Scrutinize, Stabilize, Sustain →

I was giving a presentation to developers as well as engineering hiring managers who make decisions around hiring test practitioners. This came about regarding recent decisions in hiring, or rather, lack thereof. Brought up to me numerous times was the idea that testers are not being hired if they even hinted at the idea of testing as distinct from checking. So let’s talk about this.

Continue reading Reframing Testing Arguments →

I’ve talked in the past about my perception that specialist testers need to be cross-discipline associative. And while I’ve implicitly given some ideas about what that means in various posts, here I want to be a bit more explicit.

Continue reading The Social Dimension of Testing →

One thing that’s often interesting is to define foundational terms within your discipline. It’s often even more interesting when you come across a discipline that seems to struggle with doing so. Is that the case for testing? Well, let’s talk about it.

Continue reading What Actually Is Testing? →

I often frame whatever role I’m in as a Quality and Test Specialist. It’s not really a term or phrase that our industry agrees upon. Normally people want the word “Engineer” somewhere in their title as if that term somehow wasn’t terribly vague. So let’s dig in to what I mean when I talk about being a specialist.

Continue reading My Role as Quality and Test Specialist →

Most testers are aware of the idea of a “test case.” What people outside of testing often don’t know is how much debate can swirl around what a test case is or should be. I think it’s great to have discussions about this kind of thing but I also find that there can be a temptation to either simplify it too much or complicate it too much.

Continue reading The Very Idea of Test Cases →

An interesting discussion came up on LinkedIn recently regarding the idea of whether automated tools “find bugs” and I actually found the discussion around this to be exactly what is wrong with a lot of our testing industry these days. I find testers are fighting more abstract battles and become less relevant as they do so. But maybe I’m the one that’s wrong on that? Possibly! Let’s dig in.

Continue reading The Abstract Battle for Irrelevancy →