test techniques

Jeremy Carey-Dressler describes how changes in technology, like the growth of mobile devices over personal computing, has altered the traditional roles of testers and their methods. As the market creates winners and losers, things will settle down some and it will become slightly easier to have common test techniques. For now, testers must get used to change.

Every time we look at the data, we perform an analysis that helps us make decisions—hopefully the right ones. In this article, Gil Zilberfeld describes a few traps where bug data misled him to make bad decisions. These traps are in the data itself, not the tools, and can lead us in the wrong direction.

When projects employ professional testers, their focus is generally “functional” testing, and usability quickly becomes an afterthought—if it's thought about at all. David Greenlees writes that getting participants to a state of mind where they are comfortable to honestly raise whatever issues they come across, including emotional responses, is the ultimate goal.

Understanding what’s going on “behind the scenes” provides us both insights into test design and details on failure, which makes our work more valuable. Testers, who are likely already the subject-matter experts on their applications from a business perspective, become much more powerful assets for their teams when their level of technical knowledge of their application increases through the process of service testing. This is a win-win-win for the tester, the test team, and the project team.