I have often said something like “We found a hundred bugs!” Lots of people have heard me say it. Statements like that are very valuable to me. But we should ask some vital questions about them.Consider Raisin Bran cereal. If you lived in America and weren’t in solitary confinement during the 80’s an 90’s you [...]

Regular readers know that I’m dissatisfied with the state of the testing industry. It’s a shambles, and will continue to be as long as middle managers in big companies continue to be fat juicy targets for scam-artists (large tool vendors, consulting firms, and certain “professional” organizations) and well-meaning cargo cultists (such as those who think [...]

Pradeep blogged this, today.I need to amplify it because it provides a nice example of at least six useful and important patterns all in one post. This is why I believe Pradeep is one of the leading Indian testers.Practical advice: “Ask for testability”His story is all about asking for testability and all the good things [...]

One of the comments on my post about The Esssence of Heuristics went like this:“An excellent example of a heuristic is a hammer.” Ecstasy is your friend: it picks you up at the airport.Non heuristics that can help an expert solve a problem, without being a guarantee - an abridged list:* Money* Time* Expertise* [...]

A lot of what I do is give names to testing behaviors and patterns that have been around a long time but that people are not systematically studying or using. I’m not seeking to create a standard language, but simply by applying some kind of terminology, I want to make these patterns easier to apply [...]

Excellent testing requires skill, but heuristics give structure to that skill. Heuristics help us access our skills under pressure.A heuristic is a fallible method of solving a problem or making a decision. Cem Kaner and I came to this definition based on an extensive search of papers and books across fifty years of psychology and [...]

Stuart Reid is planning to do a talk on how we should use “evidence” in our debates about what works and doesn’t work in testing.A funny thing about that is Stuart once spent 30 minutes trying to convince me that the number “35,000″ was evidence of how great the ISEB certification is, as in “35,000 [...]

A former fellow of the ISTQB sent me some secret dirt about the ISTQB qualifications process.(Editors Note: The ISTQB is the organization of cash-grubbing bullies that runs advertisements that say things like “join the elite”– meaning “pay us to give you a ridiculous and unnecessary exam that almost everyone passes so that dimwitted managers will [...]