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Archive for category Test Insight

Annotated Joel on Software – (Bad) Reasons not to test

Apr 25

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Test Annotations, Test Insight | 6 Comments

Now it is my turn!
I have the honor to disagree with Joel. I’ll pick up an easy subject: Private walled offices. 

Joel says that nothing improves morale and efficiency like private walled offices. I’ve worked in both way, and in two occasions companies I worked switched methods (from closed environments to open spaces) – in this experience, the gains of working on wall-less and open spaces are visible. Suddenly, everything is quick and everything is clear. No more leaving things to deal later. No more company-wide procrastination.
My advice: break those doors and those walls.

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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FitNesse Series in Testing Thoughts (Part 0)

Mar 7

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in FitNesse, Nerd T35t1ng, Test Insight | 2 Comments

Do you FitNesse?

I’ll (as soon as I get to do a lot of things I want to get done) post some impressions and examples on FitNesse, the cool tool for cool testers.

What I plan to do:

  1. Install and set a FitNesse setup;
  2. Make a simple standard easy program – the System Under Test!
  3. Start testing and making the program better with FitNesse.
  4. And 🙂 all this, with screenshot goodness!

When will that be?

  • Ouch. 🙁 It may take a long time. Let’s talk about this again on July…

Meanwhile: “FitNesse is designed to support acceptance testing rather than unit testing in that it facilitates detailed readable description of system function”. More information can be read in FitNesse’s website.

A Bug with a Helmet

Jan 25

Posted by Shmuel Gershon in Test Insight | 1 Comment

Israel’s National Road Safety Authority held lately very interesting ad campaings, in print, radio and TV that are aimed to increase accident-awareness for Israeli drivers.

In this country, 95% of all accidents are due to reasons which include “human factors”. While 2005 statistics show that the “Deaths in Accident” relation to the population-total was low when compared to other European contries, the same statistics demonstrate that Israel is one of the worse countries on the “Deaths in Accident” compared to number of vehicles.
That means: Our vehicles kill more people than vehicles in other countries do. This is a very scary conclusion, and I learn from it that our drivers are careless (or could not care less!) about road-accidents.

Ad Campaigns can effectively increase consciousness when done right.
Here is how the Road Safety Authority approached the problem, and how you can adapt this in your tests.

See the picture:

[Image removed from original server]

The Caption says: “He is close to your bumper. He is fast, he is furtive… He can be unexpected… And if you don’t look for him, you’ll not see him. Slow down and look for the kid in the road!”

Another strong advert in Radio went like this: “He is approaching, and he is fast. On the road, always look for the man with the helmet!”

See the pattern? It is not “look for some kid that may be around”, or “check if there’s a motorcycle”… Stop and find that motorcyclist driving overthere!
The common to both announcements is that you are left with the impression that there are children and motorcycles everywhere.
They ARE there, somewhere where you can’t see them. You don’t want to hit them, so please be careful.

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