Test Design
Better Software Magazine Articles
Crowdsourced Software Testing In response to shrinking budgets and tight launch deadlines, crowdsourced software testing is a growing trend. Here are six ways an on-demand testing team can complement your in-house QA efforts. |
Doron Reuveni
January 13, 2010 |
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Swan Song: How Testers Can Find Improbable and Unexpected Errors Black Swans, in the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are improbable and unexpected events with a severe impact. One of the most important goals of testing is to find problems in the product. What can testers do to help reduce the likelihood that we'll encounter a Black Swan? |
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Constructing the Quality Story Knowledge doesn't just exist; we build it. Sometimes we disagree on what we've got, and sometimes we disagree on how to get it. Hard as it may be to imagine, the experimental approach itself was once controversial. What can we learn from the disputes of the past? How do we manage skepticism and trust and tell the testing story? |
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Three Kinds of Measurement and Two Ways to Use Them Are software development and testing sciences subject to the same kind of numerical measurement that we use in physics? If not, what kinds of measurements should we use? How could we think more usefully about measurement? |
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Food for Thought Ideas about testing can come from many different and unexpected sources, including reductionism, agronomy, cognitive psychology, mycology, and general systems. Michael feasts on Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and finds much to whet the tester's appetite for learning about how things work. |
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Crash Course in Proficient Presenting Ben has to make a presentation at the next all-hands meeting. It'll be his very first presentation, and just thinking about it has sent him into a panic. Fortunately, he has the support of an experienced speaker and coach who offers advice and encouragement to help him become a proficient, panic-free presenter. |
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Issues about Metrics about Bugs Managers often use metrics to help make decisions about the state of the product or the quality of the work done by the test group. Yet, measurements derived from bug counts can be highly misleading because a "bug" isn't a tangible, countable thing; it's a label for some aspect of some relationship between some person and some product, and it's influenced by when and how we count ... and who is doing the counting. |
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GUT Instinct Whether or not a unit test is considered good is not simply about what it tests: It is also very much about "how" it tests. Is the test readable and maintainable? Does it define the expected behavior or merely assume it? To be sustainable, the style of a unit test is just as important as the style of any other code. Perhaps a little surprisingly, the most commonly favored test partitioning style does not meet these expectations. |
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Understanding Software Performance Testing Part 1 Most people don't fully understand the complexities and scope of a software performance test. Too often performance testing is assessed in the same manner as functional testing and, as a result, fails miserably. In this four-part series we will examine what it takes to properly plan, analyze, design, and implement a basic performance test. This is not a discussion of advanced performance techniques or analytical methods; these are the basic problems that must be addressed in software performance testing. |
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Reloadable Test Data-O-Matic Reloadable test data takes more time up front (as compared to on-the-fly data creation), but saves blood, sweat, and tears in the long term. It also virtually eliminates "works on my machine" bugs, creates a more intricate and realistic environment, and is the first step on the road to test automation. |
Tanya Dumaresq
February 26, 2009 |
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