Category Archives: Context Driven Testing

KWST2 – The NZ Peer Conference On Real Testing

The Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing is a dream come true for New Zealand testers. It represents an opportunity for the thought leaders and community-driven testers to gather and share war stories. But it’s so much more than that. James Bach has attended for the 2nd year running which adds the momentum and rich test ideas that gets the minds of the participants revved up.

KWST lets us debate on friendly turf. Through using turn-taking coloured cards, heated testing topics can be fully explored, and talking turns can be controlled. As a facilitator, I thoroughly enjoyed watching heated discussions progress until the deep issues came to the surface.

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A rookie tester’s guide to making the arrest

Bug Investigations

Thousands of words have been written about the investigation part, and it’s usually where the information ends.  You’ve got a crack bug investigation procedure.  You’ve clearly identified your oracles, you’ve mapped your coverage, you know your quality criteria.  You’ve been patrolling the mean streets of your pre-release build, and you’ve noticed something out of the ordinary.  The adrenaline starts pumping, and you’re ready to reach for the red and blues.  We wanna take this perp down.  But hold up, bronco.  Before we grab the pepper spray, let’s talk about what happens after you have a suspect in your sights.  You’re pretty sure you want to make the arrest, but we don’t want to compromise the sentencing later.

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Beyond scripts – transcripts

“Can you show me your test scripts?”
“Will your test scripts be part of the deliverable?”
“This role involves writing and executing test scripts”.

There is a sector of the software development community that believes, no, accepts unquestionably as a truth, that testing is writing test scripts then executing them. This leads to a vicious cycle of managers and clients asking for test scripts, and testers delivering test scripts because they were asked for them, thus reinforcing the requests and so on ad infinitum.
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