Testing Thoughts

There’s a very active Brazilian software testing discussion mailing list in Portuguese, called DFTestes.
When I say “very active”, I mean an average of 215 messages/month in 2009, and January 2010 has got more than 404 messages. Compared with other mailing list I participate, this is the most active one, and a tip of hat goes to the testers and list-admins that make the discussions interesting and vibrant.

Recently a big argument was held (link in Portuguese, requires registration) on whether “testers need to know programming” or not. I made some contributions to the discussion, and I’ll try to translate my point of view to English here.
Please note that there were a lot of people participating, and the post below does not present the entire debate or even an entire opinion, just the messages I wrote as answers. I hope you enjoy them.

The proposed question was:

Do testers need programming skills? Until a few years ago, most people would definitely answer NO… But I’ve known both people that seek testing jobs as an alternative to coding, and testers that write code routinely. So, do testers need or not to know programming?

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This is our fourth Happy New testing Year post, after this one, this one and this one. :)

So, a few hours before January is over, I’ll transpose here an answer to Testing.StackExchange about the last decade on testing:

Question: What are the most important software testing developments of the decade?

My Answer:
The question asks about the most important developments… Not the best or the worst, the beneficial or the harmful.
I’ll try to answer here with considerations by me and others I found on the net. Not everybody will agree that all these are good — even I don’t agree with all — but my approach here is more of a reporter than a judge. (more…)

Demetri Martin

One best friend of mine introduced me to Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin, great one-liner comedians. They are/were two funny men!! Three, actually, if you count my friend which is also funny. 

After hearing the disks for over a year, not only the jokes aren’t any less funny, but I’ve started to find subliminal testing messages in them .
I’m writing down these “insights” because I find value in them. And even if they fail to teach you something… Hey! At least the jokes are pretty funny!
So here go some favorite quotes, and their parallel in testing: 

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Hi.

Instead of a new post, I revisited and modified last month’s post, About youTesting with uTest.
It has now more content, and still has a discussion of pay-per-bug models.

The initial opinions are still there. While the pay-per-bug model presented by uTest is certainly innovative and interesting; the model still misses a lot. It will certainly be center of discussion many times in many circuits . (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’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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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.

Annotations from day 11/0702007 of the Sigist conference on Software Testing. (more…)

Annotations from day 10/0702007 of the Sigist conference on Software Testing. (more…)

Everybody loves Joel.

Everybody loves his articles, his jokes and his books.
More than that, people love to disagree with him, so they can look smart and judgmental. The funniest part is seeing the judgmental faces they do.

In 2000, Joel wrote a cool article on “Top Five (Wrong) Reasons You Don’t Have Testers“.
He’s got some great information there, and in this post I’ll just comment it (see the ‘Annotations’ tag?).

Ok, so go on (link) and read the paper.
In his paper, Joel debunk 5 miths of companies who won’t hire testers:

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