Test Design
Articles
Test Techniques for Today’s Telephones Telephones look very different today from when they were first invented, and their many capabilities and components make for some interesting test cases. Krishnan Govindarajan details his team's recent experience testing a phone, including its splitter, cloud backup, voicemail and answering machine, and VoIP, and gives some techniques to use when testing modern telephones. |
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Accessibility Testing 101: Getting Started and Catching Up As with any other quality attribute, it is ideal for accessibility to be incorporated in the early stages of design and engineering. But organizations that didn’t initially take accessibility into account can still address it now—it’s better late than never. Here are the main attributes you should consider from the design, development, and testing angles, whether you're building accessibility in from the beginning or adding it now. |
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Start Trusting Your Test Automation Again The more you rely on feedback from your automated tests, the more you need to be able to rely on the quality and defect-detection power of these tests. Unfortunately, instead of being the stable and reliable guardians of application quality they should be, automated tests regularly are a source of deceit, frustration, and confusion. Here's how you can start trusting your automated tests again. |
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Reduce Regression Issues by Establishing a Mobile Automation Lab If you have a spotty test automation strategy, you may get lots of regression issues every time you have a new release for your mobile app. A mobile device lab to run regular regression tests could be the key. Here's a plan to get a mobile automation lab up and running, as well as some practices that can help reduce the number of regression issues and improve your overall app test strategy. |
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What Testers Need in Their Accessibility Testing Toolkits A software tester’s accessibility testing toolkit should contain various tools, both to help testers “walk in the shoes” of their users and to quickly flag obvious problems and expose accessibility features (or a lack of them). High performance is only achievable with human skill, but these tools will help you uncover potential issues and make your product a better user experience for a wider audience. |
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The Unspoken Requirement: Testing for Consistency It's easy to see that style consistency is important when discussing the user interface. But there are other areas where being consistent is just as important, even though they are not as visible. Consistency is one of the quality attributes of a product—any product—even if it is not stated clearly in the requirements documents, and testers have a responsibility to check for it. |
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100 Percent Unit Test Coverage Is Not Enough Many people equate 100 percent unit test coverage with high code quality, but that is not enough. Code coverage tools only measure whether the tests execute the code; they make no judgment on the effectiveness of the tests. Testers should review unit tests, even if they have high coverage levels, and either help improve the tests or supplement them with extra tests where necessary. |
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The Future of Software Testing Many software testers have opinions about the future of their profession. Here, László Szegedi takes a look at how today's realities could shape tomorrow's possibilities for testers when it comes to new skills and technologies, roles and dynamics, and tools and devices. What could your job look like a decade or more from now? |
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How Testers Can Start Thinking like Users When it comes to what testers should focus on, people always say you have to think like a user. Aleksis Tulonen used to think he was good at doing that—until he started actually sitting next to his applications' users. Then he thought of all kinds of questions that testers should consider more often. He discusses what you can learn from your users. |
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Strategies for Testing a Lightsaber (That Don’t Include the Force) In the Star Wars saga, those in tune with the Force wield lightsabers. Lightsabers are self-built, so each one is unique and a reflection of the personality of its creator. As a tester, I found it intriguing to think about how we would test lightsabers in our own galaxy. Let’s explore how the techniques we might use for testing lightsabers can inform our real-world testing. |