I recently migrated my testingReflections.com blog over to my own website. You can find it at www.MichaelDKelly.com/blog.

It was a long time coming, I’m just generally too lazy to do things like that when the existing solution works just fine. I hope to get back to writing and blogging in the near future. I’m currently cooking up some new performance testing content and I’d like to get back to some basics and start writing about how I learn about testing again. I also have an inbox full of unanswered questions that I’ll start posting out here.

Last month we held the July session of the Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing. The topic was Techniques for Exploratory Testing and we covered a lot of cool stuff.

This month we will hold the follow up roundtable. I want to finish some of the experience reports we didn't get to (Jason, please come!!!) and I'd like to review the list I captured to see if we can identify any dynamics or trends from the data. Come, share, eat the M&Ms that Mobius puts out on the table.

Alter Ego written by Dave Christiansen has just been published. I was one of the reviewers for the book and I think it's an excellent read. It has (almost) nothing to do with testing, but it's a great read for geeks who like fiction with a technology twist. And it is twisted!

Read it. You won't regret it. (You can even preview the first six pages online...)

Earlier this month we held the July session of the Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing. The attendees were:

• Andrew Andrada
• Charlie Audritsh
• Howard Clark
• Michael Goempel
• Jason Horn
• Karen Johnson
• Michael Kelly
• Steve Lannon
• Kelvin Lim
• John McConda
• Scott McDevitt
• John Montano
• Vishal Pujary
• David Warren
• Gary Warren

The topic we focused on for the five-hour workshop was 'techniques for exploratory testing'.

Someone recently emailed me and asked me about starting their own peer workshop. I have a small amount of experience in the topic. I've run a number of IWSTs (a small local workshop) and two WOCs (a longer three-day workshop). I've attended many other peer workshops, including WHET, WOPR, WOCT, STMR, STiFS, and AWTA. They are all in some way or another in the LAWST-style.

Here are bits of my reply:

[textile]
Today at the Workshop on Open Certification we came up with the following (non-ordered) heuristics that might be useful in test question creation:

1) Plausible buzzwords
2) True but irrelevant
3) Write but for the wrong reason
4) Some fool said it
5) My boss will believe it
6) Two conclusions from the same reason
7) Incomplete reason

In this post, I gave a working definition of a boundary. That definition was "a boundary is any criteria by which I factor my model of what I'm testing."

James Bach challenged me to come up with three specific examples and to tell him how they are boundaries. With that, I pulled out my moleskin and drew three different models: a UCML model, a system diagram, and the model I used to test the time-clock application.

[textile]
Today was the second day of the WHET #4 (Workshop on Heuristic and Exploratory Testing). At the workshop, the question of "What is a boundary?" came up. Here's my answer...