testingReflections.com - functional testing

The short and the long of IT: two videotaped presentations

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:28:09 -0500

Since the middle of the year, I’ve presented and facilitated about 12 hours of sessions at 2 traditional and 3 open space conferences, plus a Googleplex visit. Two presentations are now on video, both filmed on the other side of the world from my usual location of Melbourne, Australia.

A lightning talk (at the functional tools workshop held before Agile 08 in Toronto, Canada) called Shades of Green discusses how the “green” passing tests of functional automation may not be as green as they seem. Note the static pose to stay within camera range, compensated for by the wildly waving arm. And yes, the audience was not limited to a leg and a foot.

An order of magnitude longer at around 50 minutes, a Google Tech Talk (filmed at the San Francisco Googleplex) called 80:20 Rules! Building Software Smarter looks at formal and informal ways to get significant improvements in creating software, including various puzzles and questions for viewers. I had looked at some tech talks by other people I know, and they had been watched around 1000 times over a year or so. It looks like I may hit that mark only a few days after the video was posted which is great. I hope my talk inspires people to build their software smarter. Can I turn “shades of green” into a similar talk? Probably not!

Latest Column -- Software Testers are not helpless

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 00:20:49 -0500

My latest column...

During a coffee break at a class the other week, I overheard the following comment from one student to another:

Tester: "This stinks! All of my automated test scripts are broken and I can't seem to get the tool to work now that the developers have enabled Secure Sockets Layer. I'm going to have to work through the weekend."

I know that it's generally considered rude to eavesdrop, and ruder still to comment on a conversation you weren't invited to, but I figured that since I was teaching the class I'd be forgiven. Besides, I simply couldn't help myself.

Read the rest of the column.

--
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."

Latest Column -- Inspired by taking AST's Bug Advocacy Class

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:18:53 -0500

Software testing is improved by good bug reporting

I recently completed (successfully, I might add) the second of the Association for Software Testing's all online, free to members Black Box Software Testing course. Each of these courses is four weeks in length. I've been involved with this program since years before it became a program, and I am an instructor for the first course in the series, called Foundations. For this course, called Bug Advocacy, I was a student.

Testing Lessons From Civil Engineering

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:13:14 -0500

Below is the paper I submitted as a prologue to an experience report, discussion, and (hopefully) additional research that I'm presenting for the first time during:

Registration for CAST 2008 now open!

Thu, 15 May 2008 22:48:30 -0500

The 3rd Annual Conference of the Association of Software Testing (CAST) 2008

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, July 14-16, 2008

Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing

Keynote Presentations by Gerald M. Weinberg,

Cem Kaner, Robert Sabourin, and Brian Fisher

Tutorials by Gerald M. Weinberg, Scott Barber, Hung Nguyen, and Julian Harty

The Association for Software Testing is pleased to announce its third annual conference (CAST 2008), to be held July 14-16. The meeting will be held in Toronto, Canada, a city which features enormous diversity in culture, businesses, educational institutions, and the arts. Toronto is the perfect location for a conference on this year’s theme: "Beyond the Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Software Testing".

You can view the most recent brochure here, and you can see the conference program here.

Multi-User Functional Testing

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:11:17 -0600

In the February issue of Software Test & Performance read Karen Johnson's article about multi-user testing (pp. 20-23). Karen writes about a very rare subject – functional multi-user testing. Should admit that I started to read with a thought "one more article about performance testing" – but soon realized that it is about quite different subject. And yes, indeed, without functional multi-user testing, most of errors mentioned in article will slip through (won't re-tell the article – it is available on-line, you can read it yourself). Some may be found during performance testing (probably the most severe like deadlocks – if they are in the typical scenarios you included in performance testing) – and you will need to trace them down to the source, and probably it will be much later down the cycle.

The LM DPS DE GCC test, + 40:00 years

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:15:22 -0600

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first firing of a throttleable rocket in space. The Apollo 5 flight (aka 1968-007A, aka AS-204, aka 03106) had a mission patch but no astronauts to wear it. The flight was an unmanned test of the systems that would land man on the moon. In a high altitude test simulating a moon landing, the LM (Lunar Module) DPS (Descent Propulsion System) DE (Descent Engine) GCC (Guidance Control Computer) was supposedly programmed to fire the rocket for 39 seconds. It started then stopped after 4. Realizing this was a bug (not the obvious order of magnitude one confusing 4 secs for 40, it was actually related to slower than expected fuel tank pressurization), MC (Mission Control) took over and the burn and 4 followups were done by humans.

PR rounding: 1.94 to ..... two ....point five?

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:29:44 -0600

Rounding errors appear regularly in calculations in my experience and are sometimes unfixable, especially percentages not adding up to 100 . In fact, I had a percentage bug last week. I was contributing a defect status snapshot for a report. As well as bug counts for each status, there was also a percentage. I just presumed that they added to 100, but someone else pointed out they didn’t. As I was using a standard report in the bug tracker, I decided to use it as it was, even thought the total was only 97%.

I have never seen a rounding error in a press release, until now! If you were rounding 1.94 centimetres what would you round it to? Obviously the answer is 2 cm. In this case, it was rounded to 2.5. Huh? You’ll find the explanation here in an Australian business news column, a place where you don’t usually find articles about quality issues either!

AST Update: Smart Stuff for Career Software Testers

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:44:02 -0500

December Issue of the Association for Software Testing Newsletter Now Available

A tale of 3 browser prints

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:20:35 -0500

"it was the best of prints, it was the worst of prints", with apologies to Charles Dickens. Sometimes we "accidentally" test: trying to get some task done, we actually discover things we don't want to when we just want to get the job done. I had this happen trying to print an article at a web site. My default browser was having problems with a plugin and appeared to crash during the print (let's call it browser A). I then used another browser to do the print (Browser B). When I went to collect my printout, I was surprised to find 2 print outs. Had I accidentally printed the page twice from Browser B? No, because the printouts were surprisingly different. Browser A printed 4 pages, with quite small print. Browser B printed 6 pages, but in a much larger, easier-to-read font. Curious. I then went back and tried it with a 3rd browser (browser C). Browser C printed in a readable font, but cut off the last words on each line, effectively making it impossible to read. I'd used default settings for each browser, and 3 different results.

The manic mouse, the double post and the immovable deadline

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:50:44 -0600

While writing my OnceWasWindowless post I found myself in unusual circumstances. I was in an airport flight club lounge using a PC that became progressively unhealthy. I checked some email, went to print it and realized there was a printer issue. I gave up on that, so decided to write a short blog post. I did some net surfing, found something interesting, logged into testingreflections, and started creating my blog entry. I was working well towards my fixed deadline (plane departure).

Should have tested that - supersized iphone bills

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 02:02:19 -0500

[textile]
The media (including the New York Times where I noticed this) is reporting that people's first iphone bills from AT&T are huge, not in cost but in weight. Paper bills for telephone services have grown in the last few years. Technology allows each call to be tracked and included in a bill, so the summary bill of several years ago has typically grown to 5-10 pages listing all the numbers called. The iphone bills have been up to 50 pages, even 300 double-sided pages in one case (but this woman apparently sent 30,000 text messages in a month! Huh? Was this a publicity stunt or some other oddity? She posted the video of her bill to the net and allegedly got several million viewers)

STARwest 06 best paper - finally posted......

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:21:28 -0500

I wish we had invented cloning, but there's only one me, so better late than never.
I've finally posted the paper that won me Best Paper at STARwest 06. You'll find it under Glenford Myers here
http://www.testingspot.net/#test_info
I first read about bug clusters in a general IT magazine in the 1980s, but there were no references. I then went on to do some research in the area and even won some best presentations at conferences. Then I discovered that one of the first people to talk about bug clusters was Glenford Myers back in 1976. He included it with a lot of other testing laws. I discuss these in the paper, and welcome any feedback or other testing laws that people may have come across. Happy reading....

Software Testing Lessons from my Children

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 08:53:17 -0500

My most recent column has just been posted on TechTarget in which I discuss some of the lessons I‘ve learned from my children about software testing.

********

I had planned an entirely different topic for this month, but I‘m sitting down to write this on Father‘s Day while my sons (Nicholas, age 8, and Taylor, age 4) are napping, and realizing that I‘ve never written about what I have learned about testing from my boys.

When testing, remember: customers buy service, not only a product.

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 05:32:35 -0500

I dare to define a different view of quality: vendor ability to control exploitation issues. Wait a bit! I don’t like definition and generalization games like those: What’s quality? How to measure it? Who owns it? Is it different for (packaged) products ?
What matters to my mind – how does this influence testing? I want to show in this blog (based on my experience in testing packaged products, when customer has no idea about requirements) that tester not only need to think like a customer, but also keep in mind the customer services/maintenance to be provided by your company. It does matter, especially when reporting and prioritizing defects.