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non-functional testing | performance testing
I quickly found that my capacity of what I can do in addition to regular work is pretty limited: while I was writing a paper for the upcoming CMG conference and then helping a little with the conference organization as CPE (Computer Performance Evaluation) Subject Area Chair (CMG is a volunteer organization), I wasn't able to blog or update my site (probably more energy than time). Now this is mainly over: the CMG preliminary agenda was just published. It is time to summarize and move forward.

A test is "an example of the rule in practice", but...

test driven development

In Jason Gorman's post called Tests Are Instances Of Rules he says:

In test-driven development, we use tests as executable specifications of what is required of the software we create.

For this to work effectively, our tests have to convey the underlying intent. And this requires us to ponder the relationship between a test and a specification.

5 Questions with Scott Barber by a Braidy Tester

context-driven testing | general software testing | industry recognition | other online resources | performance testing | perspectives

I recently had the honor of being interviewed by Michael Hunter, a Braidy Tester, for Dr. Dobbs Portal. Check it out: 5 Questions with Scott Barber.

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Scott Barber
President & Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Executive Director, Association for Software Testing
Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
 
"If you can see it in your mind...
     you will find it in your life."

How nice it is to see...

agile

I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see the fruits of my labours! I had a particularly proud moment when I read 32 Burndowns by Rob Hardy on the BBCi Labs blog... The rich collection of example burn-downs tell 32 different stories... and Rob's summary of how these projects work is dramatically different to the one he might have told only 2 years ago... but for me the gratifying aspect of this is seeing the ongoing growth in their development and understanding of what they do, how they do it and why they do it that way...

How To

In recent weeks I’ve had the good fortune to return to do some work on a product I worked on a couple of years ago. I’m working with a product that I have deep history and knowledge of and I’m happy to be working with again.

A tester on the team who’s fairly new to the team needed some help. When I heard what she needed I had to think about it for a bit. This would have been information I would have had to have learned as well. So I did something that I often do and realized it might be worthwhile to blog about and share. I turned to a folder I create for every project and trolled through a stack of my notepad files. My how-to’s files.

QA/Testing (Again)

Software is about the only industry that lumps testing and QA under one banner. It's one of those things where common misuse of a term results in the community changing it's meaning... this happens in mainstream language all the time.

Testing something is actually more analogous to quality control or, QC. QA is more concerned with the process - collecting information about the performance of the process in order to determine if we are 'assuring' (or more realistically increasing the probability of) quality. Statistical information about problems found in the product (during quality control) is just one of many pieces of info useful to someone concerned with QA (which really should be the whole project team)

Cookies & the hosts file on Vista

general software testing
I haven’t tested a cookie in a long time, so long I realized I didn’t know where cookies are stored on Vista. Finding cookies on Vista is more of a headache than I can recall in any other Windows versions. There are two directories:

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\
C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Cookies\Low\

Even though I had the path, I still couldn’t find the cookies. I finally learned what I needed to do was to remove a protection setting. (Even though I’m an administrator on the Vista laptop I was using and I have the annoying user control protection turned off, I still had to turn this file protection setting off as well.) I found two pieces of information especially helpful:

CAST: a conference about conferring

The third annual Conference for the Association of Software Testing took place this week in Toronto. I’ve spent the last couple of days in conversations with people from multiple countries talking about testing from many perspectives.

What’s cool about the conference is how much conferring takes place. Spontaneous conversations among people who’ve never met before bubble up when one person makes a comment and like-minded people find each other. And sometimes when people who aren’t like-minded find each other.
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