There is a relatively common sentiment that tester roles, as opposed to the testing activity, should disappear entirely. We see that a bit with descriptions of jobs like “Software Development Engineer in Test” (SDET) which basically just means “developer who can test” rather than “tester who can develop.” Is this evolution necessarily an unhealthy one? Let’s talk about this.
Category: Testing
Testing Is The Art Of …
The title of this post indicates a sentiment you’ll often see. “Testing is the art of …” and then fill in some word or phrase. While I get the intent behind this, the word or phrase used to complete the sentence is often a bit lacking and actually reinforces the opinion that many have of testing, which is that it’s not a distinct enough discipline.
Testers and the Bug Hunting Focus
What do people tend to think of when they hear “tester”? More specifically, what do they think a person called “tester” primarily does? Arguably, more often than not, you’re going to hear something like “a tester’s role is to find bugs” or “a tester helps surface issues.” As an approximation, that may be accurate. But it’s only a very rough approximation. And a dangerous one. So let’s talk about this.
Revisiting Testing vs Checking
As part of my attempt to continue my thinking on the topic of “tests” and “checks”, I’m revisiting what I talked about previously. I want to see if my thinking has changed and I want to set myself up for being willing to change my opinion. I don’t want to be one of the fundamentalists I wrote about. So let’s take another trip down the rabbit hole.
The Prevalence of Parallax
I believe there’s an interesting parallax effect that happens in conversations around testing and the implementation of testing ideas. This is an area I want to investigate a bit more so I’ll start off as I usually do: with my half-formed ideas as the basis for discussion, elaboration and possible refutation.
If You’re Human, You Test …
… but you may not be a tester. Or at least not a specialist tester. Here I’ll close out 2017 on this topic which will indicate some of my future direction in 2018.
Modeling Testing
Dan Ashby recently posted his views regarding a model for test strategies and heuristics. I really like the level of effort put into it, particularly because it was clearly distilled not just from thought but thought based on experience. Let’s talk about this.
Wherefore the Death of “Manual Testing”
I see so many people lately talking about the “death of manual testing.” Opinions obviously polarize on this but what I don’t see is testers engaging at all with why this perception is there. There is a form of indoctrination that happens across the industry. And testers, by and large, do nothing to combat it. Largely because they ignore where it’s coming from. Let’s talk about this a bit.
About Testing
Earlier I talked about describing my own role. I think what I said there is almost interesting. Interesting, for me that is. But I often find testers struggling to frame their value beyond “I find bugs” or “I help mitigate risk.” So let’s dig into this a little bit.
Testing vs Checking – A Flawed Argument?
Lately I’ve been seeing that the whole “testing” vs “checking” debate is now more used as a punchline than it is for any serious discussion around testing as an activity and tests as an artifact. Regardless of my perception, which may not be indicative, I believe that this distinction has not been very helpful. But let’s talk about it. Maybe someone will convince me I’m wrong.
When Do You Stop Testing?
The question of this blog title comes up often. The worst answer that can be given is: “When there are no more bugs.” It’s the worst answer because the inevitable follow up is: “But how do you know?” On the other hand, some people, upon answering this, begin providing a very convoluted answer. Here’s my take.
Testing Fundamentalism?
I phrase the title of this article as a question. This will be a short article. I don’t have solutions. I’m not even sure I have a problem. But I think I do. I think I’m sensing a problem based on observations. But maybe not. Let’s see if you agree or disagree.
Uncomplicate TDD and BDD
Similar to reframing agile, I encounter a (perhaps surprising) number of experienced developers who outright deny that approaches like TDD or BDD have any value and it seems like we need a reframing here. But, in fact, I’ve found it’s more a case of getting people to uncomplicate the ideas.
Reframing Agile
Lots of people seem to focus on whether agile has failed. Or whether it’s dead. Or whether it’s a methodology. Or a process. What you end up with is something akin to Edmund Burke’s denunciation of political factionalism: “tessellated pavement without cement.” In the testing world this is even more so the case given the oft-used phrase “agile tester”, which any test specialist should be against. So let’s talk about this.
The Danger of the Muddy Thinker
I talked before about tradition and dogma and not too long ago, on LinkedIn, I saw someone post yet another one of those bits of dogma in our industry without considering the context. The discussion that ensued showcased exactly the problem with simply regurgitating the “received wisdom” of others. So let’s talk about this.
Testing Learning Systems
Let’s continue the from the last post where you saw a working implementation of a learning environment called Pacumen. Here I want to provide you more details of the basis for this kind of work and use that as a springboard for thinking about how testers fit in these situations.
Testing and AI
What’s been interesting in the testing world — at least the part of it that I hang out in — is the application of different AI-based learning algorithms to the act of exploring an application and seeing what (if anything) that tells us regarding the algorithmic and non-algorithmic parts of the testing discipline. Let’s talk about this because I think is fertile ground for testers to be exploring.
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.