Twas the night before Christmas and all through the cubes
Not a coder was patching some critical kludge.

The managers nestled all snug in their beds
Had seen the unit tests, all green, no reds.

But not just with machines was this code made pure
Our testers have brains, and they used them for sure.

These sapient lads, and lasses precise
Had trapped critical bugs, with minds like a vise.

This was my first time using an electronic voting machine. Did anyone else have to fight the urge to test the software instead of just voting?

What if we elected a President of Testing?

Moderator:
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the campus of Baseline University for the first debate between candidates for the President of Software Testing, I'm your moderator, Quentin Colson, (though sometimes I go by Quentin Anderson just to confuse everyone).

If testing is a service, what does that make testers?

I’ve heard much about the definition of testing being a service to the project, or at least that this should be the definition of testing, and I agree. Most of this comes from what I’ve heard and read from James Bach and Michael Bolton as part of the Rapid Testing courses.

I’d like to extend this metaphor a step further though. What do you call the person who performs a service? The word service is tossed around so often in the software world that it’s lost a lot of meaning and is easy on the ears. Once the form is changed to “servant” though, you might get some interesting responses. “Me, a servant?”

The next Black Box Software Testing (BBST) Foundations class will begin July 20th, right on the heels of the CAST Conference , so we expect demand to be high. Scott Barber will be lead instructor with Elaine Conway and myself as co-instructors.

I'm excited to be giving my first STAR West track presentation this October. My topic is "Fun With Regulated Testing", where I'll be talking about ways to do to better testing in regulated contexts.

I hope to see you there!

These past two days, Mobius has had the pleasure to host Mike and Dave’s excellent Exploratory Testing Practicum (PDF alert). One of our exercises on Wednesday was to think about some heuristics we use in every day testing and come up with easy-to-remember names for them. I’m sure that I am not the first to recognize this one, so I’ll also invoke the Pirate Heuristic to create it. I call mine the Turtle Test.

I was intrigued by a discussion that went on recently in the software-testing Yahoo message board. Matt Heusser started the conversation, spun off of another thread in the forum about Exploratory vs. Scripted testing (itself always a fun topic for debate :) . The thread started with a question about what kind of testing discovers defects and what kind verifies functionality.