Testing Thoughts

These days I went to a book fair of a well known publishing house, and found there my very own analogy for Exploratory Testing.
I tell the story and analogy below for your pondering and criticism.

I like books, better yet when they are good/useful books, and even more when they’re cheap — so I came to the fair prepared! I planned a budget (100 NIS) studied the catalog of discounted books and decided beforehand which books I wanted to buy: (more…)

Eric Sink is very well known in the software development community. I would say he’s a legend, but he says he’s not one.

He writes books, software, and gives interviews about the craft and business of software. Not only that, but (not surprisingly) he’s also got a blog.

Two months ago he wrote that reading your colleagues code check-ins is a good practice, and I think this is good advice. And good advice for software testers too: I read the bugs submitted by my team on a regular base, and it’s been very enlightening (often to me, at times to them too).

I don’t like copy-paste, but as an experience on the parallels between development/testing, I’ll copy his entire post, just changing the parts that are development-related to testing-related words.
“Great artists steal“, right? Let’s see if it is intelligible (my changes are in blue). (more…)

I was reading a job position offering these days for a “QA engineer“.
There was the usual mumbo jumbo of the required traits (“BSC in computer science or equivalent“, “Worked directly with R&D department“) and advantage points (”General knowledge of at least one mainstream (programming) language“), and one of the requirements lines said “Testing methodologies: STD, STP“.
I got curious to know what these methodologies are and what the TLA mean, so I called the company offering the job: (more…)

I like the SQE.
SQE brings columns by Michael Bolton almost monthly on the Better Magazine. They also arrange the nice STAR conferences (hadn’t the opportunity to participate yet, but I will eventually) and store a large number of articles online of all testing flavors.

Today morning I was greeted by an Email from SQE: The subject read “Are you certifiable?“.
My first reaction was to discuss the term. If I am certifiable? I? In my mind, I was arguing whether a person can be considered certifiable or maybe the topic of certification is the one certifiable.
As in “Software Testing is (or not) a certifiable topic” against “Johnny is a certifiable (or not) software tester”.

I was puzzled over the confusing choice of words:

(more…)

I’ve recently heard The Graphing Calculator Story, a ~54:00 min long Google Tech video on YouTube. On it, Ron Avitzur tells the story of the development of his (and Greg’s) Graphing Calculator, an impressive mathematical software that shipped with Mac computers for years.
What’s special about the story? Well, he did it at Apple, but for free (his contract was already closed), and in secret (Apple had cancelled the project). As he says, sneaking into the building and volunteering for an eight billion dollar corporation.

I enjoyed the story very much. It is very exciting to see the passion he had (has) for his software and how he was committed to it. Plus, Ron is a great story teller.
The graphing calculator had all the ingredients of a cool app. It scratched a developer’s personal itch, and is a great example of NeoVictorian computing: built for people, built by people, crafted in workshop, inspired.
Actually, if we’re commenting on NeoVictorianism, Ron was one that really “woke up one day to find himself living in the software factory“. The night got very cold, they said the factory is going to close and he should move somewhere else. The cool part? He kept doing his individual craftsmanship inside the corporation. Secretly.

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This is the third Happy New testing Year, after this one and this one.
This is quite exciting, three new years means two full years!

Let’s recapitulate my 2008 blogging activity:

• This last year I did not do my self-goal of at least 12 posts, due to the account problem at the beginning of the year.
  From the new posts, one (Testers don’t think like Developers think like Computers) entered my list of ‘classic posts that new team members read’ :) together with A Bug with a Helmet and the “untestable things posts (1, 2, 3)”.
• This also means that, although the blog is kept unpublicized, I’ve got (compulsory) readers now .
• I had at least two very interesting to write BotT: BotT: Excel 2007 has algebra difficulties… and BotT: Linus’ bug, youtube no workee!.
• On the corporate blogs, I started a new series of post about Intel(R) AMT - not as popular as the ASF series, but I got good feedback. Read if you’re interested in the technology I work on.

Hope this next year comes with at least 12 posts, all of them useful.
Gotta start thinking on January’s post…

Hi.

Writing the Fitnesse posts turned to be harder than I thought.
I do have a bit of tests ready for the triangle case, but not enough text to make an interesting post. As I’m not using Fitnesse in my day-to-day work, it makes it harder to bring cool insights or to explore on the framework.

But I just discovered someone who not only uses Fitnesse at work, but also writes articles about Fitnesse that give the Fitnese feeling:

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Hi everybody!

The last BotT (Bug of this time) was long ago, when we talked about testing and the Excel bug.
So now we’ve got a cool one, on which the most notable point is not the bug, is the submitter .

Bug 439858 on Fedora (a Linux distribution) was (supposedly) submitted by Linus Torvalds himself. He started the Linux wave on August 91, and is still posting bugs on March 08 - you gotta admire him.
I am aware that the submitter signing “Linus Torvalds” may not be Linus. It actually doesn’t matter, let’s just pretend it is for sensationalism’s sake (regarding the admiration, you still gotta admire him even if the bug’s not his ).

Let’s try to analyze the bug report, and the bug itself, to see what we can learn:

(more…)

In this year I held a session on the “SIGiST Israel” conference.
It was a one hour lecture introducing advanced techniques, with examples of software testing through Fault Injection (with HEAT tools) and through Fuzz (variety of free tools). This month I received the average grade from the feedback sheets: 97/100!
Of course, I’m happy with the results. :) Thanks to all who attended and asked questions.

It is possible that I’ll post here a transcript or some text about this lecture. One option may be to add my comments from the lecture as notes in the powerpoint slides and post the slides here. But I don’t like powerpoint much as it does a poor job of passing information (it takes the written word and limits it into bad format and structure).
Finding the time, I’ll write the lecture in extense text.

In order to keep this post still useful, here goes a short summary of the talk:

(more…)

Annotations from day 24/06/2008 of the Sigist conference on Software Testing.

When not from a lecture focus, then from a side comment or explanation. Below you’ll find some insights I gained from today’s lecture. When not from a lecture focus, the ideas come from a side comment or explanation:

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We all are told constantly not to think like a programmers.
We’ve told other people dozens of times “Don’t you think like a programmer. We don’t care why the software does it - it is still wrong”.

For testers, thinking like developers is evil. If you think like a programmer, you’ll start excusing the software and will forgive the system’s bugs.

I am reading the very cool book “Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, and I just understood a little bit more on why’s so bad sharing the developers mindset.

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I’ve started a quote collection. Many times I want to quote someone but I just don’t remember how exactly the phrase was. Or remember the quote but am not certain on the source…

I am fond of quoting.
Not sure why, but I like to quote. I guess it gives some legitimating to what I am saying.

So, the quote collection is available at this address: http://testing.gershon.info/quote-collection/. It will grow slowly, please check it regularly.

Do you use MS Office 2007?
Well, then you probably noticed that Excel multiplies “850 x 77.1″ as “100,000″ instead of “65,535″.

Uh, you didn’t notice? Well neither did I until I read it all over the internet.
See the post on SlashDot for scoop, and see its comments for some good laughs.

There are explanations all around about how this bug came to appear in Excel.
The best one is probably Joel’s one (you may remember Joel from this post). (more…)

When I started the blog, I planned on at least one post per month.
I managed pretty well, with 15 posts in a year, plus a handfull of draft wanderings that maybe will se the light someday…

But then the new year came and everything wreaked havoc.
I had hosting issues (of which I am to blame for most) and then had to make a new and different account and restore everything, from the WordPress system to the posts databases, including tweaking the code to look for everything in the new locations. Too much work, too little coffee.

So that’s the reason.
And new year is coming, this time, in April .

Happy New Testing Year, then!
Let’s see if I can continue with the post a month this time

I was once talking with a friend about automation and when it should be done. I commented with him about the excellent “When Should a Test Be Automated?” paper by Brian Marick, and told him that “this is one of the three texts that changed my testing life”. I surprised myself by the fact these three texts were categorized in my head as such, and with the promptness I could think of them at the spot.

So I want to share with you these articles, with a bit of background on them, and hyperlinks wherever I can find them. They are presented in the (chronologic) order they came to my attention.

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