I find it interesting how themes can pop up and attract attention on social media. Sometimes when I see a theme that is misguided, I’ll sometimes chip in, other times I’ll just shrug. A theme I see pop up reasonably often is the one focused on “testing myths”. So, what is a myth? If you describe a … More The Myths of Testing

In what is my first blog post for quite a while I’m going to look at the notion that “testers prevent defects”. I see this claim made by non-testers talking about testing (yes “agile” I’m looking at you as well as your coaches), professional testers and test consultancies. It must be incredibly enticing to issue … More Testing and Prevention – The Illusion

I gave myself 60 minutes to write a blog about my day and the excitement that testing brings me. For better or worse, here it is. I’ve written in previous posts and articles that I find testing enormously satisfying and challenging. Every challenge is unique in some ways but often similar in other ways. Testing … More The thrill of testing

During my time on this planet I’ve engaged in both team and individual sports. On the team side there was, predominantly, cricket and basketball and on the solo side, squash. In competition squash (not at elite levels) you play in a group of four, so there is some aspect of team, but during the actual … More umpires are testers too

This post considers some of the problems we face when creating software and then explores if reframing those issues, by using language from another domain, might lead us to new perspectives or new approaches to solving problems. It might seem strange for a tester to be writing about economics. Moreover, this post isn’t even specifically … More some Economics of software

I was recently asked if I could talk to some of my work colleagues about bugs. More specifically I was asked if i could explain what a good bug report looks like and what information it might contain. The people in focus here are the Halaxy Service team. I admire people who work in customer … More Bug Reporting can be simple

When did we start to believe that automation in testing is intelligent? When did we start to believe that we can automate away human thinking within software testing? When did testers, many of whom rally to a cry of ” we are misunderstood and not appreciated” decide it would be a good idea to promote … More Automation – what bugs me

Acknowledgement: My thanks to Lee Hawkins and Lisa Crispin for reviewing my blog before publishing. I really appreciate you providing the time to provide feedback on my writing. In my last blog Not everybody can test I noted the importance of being able to tell stories about your testing. If you want to people to … More Creating your story

It has been, of late, an interesting time to observe LinkedIn posts. Amongst the popular themes are  “manual testing” and “not everybody can test”. While the term “manual testing” annoys me, for the moment, I’m a little over that discussion. Let’s look at the “not everybody can test” proposition. I’m uncertain if I’m about to … More Not everybody can test

This blog was co-written with Lee Hawkins. You can find Lee’s blog posts at https://therockertester.wordpress.com/ . Lee can be found on Twitter @therockertester We recently read an article on the QA Revolution website, titled 7 Great Reasons to Write Detailed Test Cases, which claims to give “valid justification to write detailed test cases” and goes … More The case against detailed tests cases (part one)