BIG BUGS

There are countless documents, articles, presentations, whitepapers that use the graph where the cost of identifying and fixing a bug increases exponentially over time. Last year I read one whitepaper that had this graph, naively I thought it would be worth reading (since it had this graph)… how wrong was I? The whitepaper didn't say anything about finding defects early to reduce costs - nothing whatsoever! I felt that I'd lost half an hour of my life, I felt cheated; no joke; I take the testing profession seriously - even if I create testing cartoons!
Although they say time heals, I'm now really sceptical whenever I see the same graph pasted into yet another testing article.

How to spot a tester in a...

Whenever you're testing, make sure you know why you're testing!

Which one is better?

The project team

What do you do?

Agile Testing

There's lots of talk about Agile at the moment, well, that's what it seems to me. When I first read the Agile manifesto, I got a big surprise... it was all sooo obvious! Of course people are more important! Of course working software is more important! Etc!
Now that I've calmed down and read up more about it, I think Agile is great and can't wait to get involved in an Agile project. Although, I'm slightly suspicious that it's always spelt with a capital a!

The Test Conference

During my early years in software testing, I would get an email invite to a test conference. My first thought would be "What on earth do they talk about for a whole day?!!". Of course, now with a bit of experience, I could talk about testing for a whole week, not just one day... not that anyone would listen ;o)

6 Goggles of s/w testing

I've attended a number of management, teamwork and team leading training courses over the years, but as time goes on, they all seem to merge into one fuzzy memory where they teach you weird and wonderful concepts of becoming a better something or other... I have no idea who comes up with all the different strategies, approaches, theories for leadership and teamwork, but one that seems very popular and crops up regularly is the 6 thinking hats. I think one of its strengths is its simplicity - you wear a different colour hat for a different purpose - and that's that! Which made me think, can I come up with a simple yet useful concept for testing? Probably not, but I thought I'll give it a go...

That's not a bug

Since I started reading blogs, articles and forums about testing, I've noticed testers mocking developers when they use the phrase "It's not a defect, users would never do that" or something along those lines. In fact, I have been on the receiving end of that kind of comment recently when a developer told me "It's not a defect, it's a suggestion for improvement". Naturally, I disagreed! After I calmed down, I tried to think from the developer's point of view, and knowing he was very intelligent and good at his job, I started to realise, that maybe, ever so often, us testers aren't always right... (but on this occasion, I was!).