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One of my favourite blogs (http://www.experientia.com/blog/) carried an essay/article on humans and machines by Marina Gorbis. It’s a breezy article but makes some awesome points and each point Marina made rang true for what we are seeing in the Testing world. Marina makes a point that machines are replacing the mechanistic jobs traditionally done by
I’ve always tried to appreciate ‘context’ when I talk about Testing and also when I Test because ‘context’ is a very real thing. I’m an avid campaigner against Best Practices in Testing and I take every opportunity possible to question blatant “context unaware” statements about testing, especially so when they are communicated as “law”.
There comes a time when we all use numbers to represent some fact or information. These numbers *can* be highly effective at communicating your information. Image courtesy of : http://www.flickr.com/photos/fragmented/ These numbers could become the defacto representation of some outcome, fact or finding. These numbers could become the metric you make a decision by.
In almost all places of work, there exists a level of wasted time and effort when communicating a message multiple times. In almost all places of work, there exists a level of wasted time and effort when communicating a message multiple times. These “duplicate conversations” are wasteful and ultimately take people away from the
I’m reading an excellent book at the moment called “Game Storming” by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. It’s one of those books that’s given me a “lesson” or insight in every chapter. In essence Game Storming is about generating new ideas and novel solutions. It’s a way of getting from Starting
It seems the more that something becomes popular the more that people start to hate it, often without even trying it. Look at what’s happening with Agile in the testing community. A lot of negativity from people who’ve never tried it. The lashing out is usually based on false ideas of what it actually means
I’ve studied communications for years now but today was the first time I encountered the video from Archive.org that I’ve included in this post. Which is a shame because it’s fantastic. At the same time I’m glad I’ve stumbled across this video now so that I can share it with those who are interested. Communication
I find The Peltzman Effect incredibly interesting from a Testing point of view. “The Peltzman effect is the hypothesized tendency of people to react to a safety regulation by increasing other risky behavior, offsetting some or all of the benefit of the regulation” (Wikipedia) I find it interesting because I wonder whether we see this
I got asked a question the other day about metrics. “If you don’t use metrics to assess test completion, how do you know when you are half way complete?” I won’t go in to all of the details surrounding the discussion that ensued, but I thought I would share with you the
In the Testing world, as in any other domain, there are those who are passionate about their work, those who go to work to get paid and those who just don’t care (and a number of people at varying points on this extreme sliding scale). Scarily I see a significant number of people looking
I received quite a few messages and comments about my future of software testing post and for those that took the time to respond, thank you. But one that intrigued me was an email from an anonymous tester. It wasn’t negative, nor positive, but instead extolled the virtues of certification and how certification schemes will
I’ve mentioned a few times via Twitter (mainly from India) about a neat little tool Julian Harty talked about at the Step_Auto conference; FightingLayoutBugs. It’s a Java code project that checks for layout bugs. It’s all Open Source code and available from “http://code.google.com/p/fighting-layout-bugs/“. So here is what FightingLayoutBugs does out of the tin: DetectInvalidImageUrls
You’ve built a new test team but your bug counts are on the increase in both test and live. Why? You are sat there wondering what went wrong. Why the grief? Why the drama? How can this be? Well, it’s just a case of SNOT. S – Safety N – Net O –
The Future of Software Testing I’ve been thinking recently about the future of software testing. I’ve been wondering why some people are still testing the same way they did 10 years ago and why others are trying new ways, pushing boundaries or at least experimenting slightly. I’ve been wondering why some people are
One of the big challenges for anyone working on web based projects is the age old challenge of browser compatibility. The number of browsers supported typically depends on a number of factors; your strategy as a business, your customer base (i.e. what browsers they are using) and your required use of the browser (do you