testing

Articles

Test pyramid with the base unit test layer eroded The Eroding Agile Test Pyramid

The test pyramid is a great model for designing your test portfolio. However, the bottom tends to fall out when you shift from progression testing to regression testing. The tests start failing, eroding the number of working unit tests at the base of your pyramid. If you don't have the development resources required for continuous unit test maintenance, there are still things you can do.

Wolfgang Platz's picture Wolfgang Platz
Chefs preparing and cooking food Taste-Testing: Cooking Up Good Software

Think about what we do while cooking food to make it the best dish possible. We taste the food first, make necessary adjustments and add a few more ingredients, taste the food again, and repeat until the dish is how we want it. This is just like building a software product. If you don’t taste the food before serving it—or test the software before rolling it out—there will be a risk that the quality isn’t up to your standards.

Arun Kumar Dutta's picture Arun Kumar Dutta
Power button Simplify Continuous Operation Tests with a Periodic Reboot

Continuous operation tests find important bugs, partly as a result of their long operation and partly by increasing the probability of finding statistical bugs. However, CO tests have their own downsides. Mandating a periodic reset or reboot can work around these issues, as well as save time and cost for testing, reproduction, debugging, and fix verification.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl
Test documentation Tests as Documentation

It’s important that test authors keep in mind the inherent authority their tests possess. After all, an application’s tests are sometimes the first lines of code a new developer will read when acclimating to a new codebase. Tests aren't the only kind of documentation you need, but automated tests in a CI environment can provide a lot of useful information.

Nelson Nogales's picture Nelson Nogales
Squares in organized rows next to scattered squares The Difference between Structured and Unstructured Exploratory Testing

There are a lot of misunderstandings about exploratory testing. In some organizations exploratory testing is done unprofessionally and in an unstructured way—there's no preparation, no test strategy, and no test design or coverage techniques. This leads to blinds spots in the testing, as well as regression issues. Here's how one company made its exploratory testing more structured.

Gearbox for a car with a manual transmission Shifting Your Testing: When to Switch Gears

Shifting your testing either left or right can meet different needs and improve different aspects. How do you know whether to make a change? Let your test cycles be your guide. Just like when driving a car with a manual transmission, if the engine starts to whine or you’re afraid you’re about to stall out, switching gears may be just what you need.

Maximilian Bauer's picture Maximilian Bauer
Collection of random numbers When a Number Is Not a Number: Benefits of Random Test Generators

We like to hope that we will consider all possible situations when devising our tests, but it’s all too easy to overlook the unusual cases. That’s the benefit of random test generators. We might feel comfortable after testing a few dozen test cases; these tools generate hundreds. With more stuff getting tossed at the wall, there is a greater likelihood that something interesting sticks.

Steve Poling's picture Steve Poling
Brain made out of a circuit board Leveraging Machine Learning to Predict Test Coverage

Test coverage is an important metric within test management, and as technology evolves, we‘re able to leverage new trends to predict coverage. Weka, an open source suite of machine learning software, can take your test management beyond spreadsheets to the latest AI technologies, letting you predict your test coverage earlier with greater accuracy.

Bhavani Ramasubbu's picture Bhavani Ramasubbu
Group of people holding trophy that says "2018" Top 10 StickyMinds Articles of 2018

With the rise of technology like AI and practices like DevOps, teams everywhere are looking for ways to speed up testing without sacrificing quality. The articles in 2018 reflect that, with the most popular topics being shifting testing left, optimizing tests for continuous integration, and the future of software testing. If you're looking for cutting-edge testing techniques, check out this roundup.

Beth Romanik's picture Beth Romanik
Testers looking at graphs of performance test results Responsibly Reporting Performance Test Results: Trends, Noise, and Uncertainty

In order for performance test results to have value, you should report them in context. There are two main considerations: How do these compare to previous results? And how can we provide early reports on performance while emphasizing that these are preliminary results that may change significantly as we progress? Here are some ideas for responsible reporting.

Michael Stahl's picture Michael Stahl

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