When I was in Middle School (~12 years old, around 1971), we did a murder mystery exercise in class. The teacher passed out slips of papers with clues and then shut up. The children milled around aimlessly for a while, comparing slips. Finally, I got fed up, got everyone’s attention, and said, “OK. Everyone with [...]

A continual debate on the agile-testing mailing list is to what degree testers think differently than programmers and are therefore able to find bugs that programmers won’t. Without ever really resolving that question, the conversation usually moves onto whether the mental differences are innate or learnable.I myself have no fixed opinion on the matter. That’s [...]

From Andy Pols: the customer who wouldn’t deploy without a test (via Keith Braithwaite).

This program aims to encourage researchers to focus on research questions and issues concerned with agile software development. Researchers are encouraged to apply for small grants to support activities such as conducting a series of visits to practitioner sites, performing interviews, supporting a researcher for a short time to extend existing work into agile development, [...]

The value of programmer TDD is well established. It’s natural to extrapolate that practice to business-facing tests, hoping to obtain similar value. We’ve been banging away at that for years, and the results disappoint me. Perhaps it would be better to invest heavily in unprecedented amounts of built-in support for manual exploratory testing.In 1998, I [...]

One thing I meant to say and forgot: Just as the evolution of amphibians didn’t mean that all the fish disappeared, the creation of a new kind of testing to fit a new niche doesn’t mean existing kinds are now obsolete.Context-driven testing:Testing Computer Software, Kaner, Falk, and NguyenLessons Learned in Software Testing, Kaner, Bach, and [...]

My spam filter seems to be classifying everything as spam. I’ve unspammed the real comments that hadn’t been auto-deleted yet. If you were wondering why your comment never got posted, that’s why. Maybe I should go back to requiring registration.

For service, give me a rude but efficient New Englander over a friendly but slow Southerner any day. I’ve been made fun of for shutting the dishwasher door with my foot while simultaneously stretching the other way to grab something out of a cupboard, but it just makes sense to me to do things in [...]