A good tester asks good questions

By on April 21, 2011 in Communication, Test Process, Testing Intelligence, Uncategorized

You finally schedule a meeting with your CEO in order to get her inputs into what should be tested in the system. You arrive at the meeting and ask her: “Mrs. CEO, I have been given the task of testing the new product, and I wanted to ask you what do you think should be tested?”.
She stops and looks at you for a couple of seconds before answering: “Well, I don’t know, aren’t you the testing expert here…? I guess you better test everything, right? We don’t want any bugs slipping out the door, do we?”

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A tester should know when to Take a Stand!

By on April 12, 2011 in Communication, Management, Test Process

Sometimes we as testers will run into situations where we disagree with the rest of the team. We might thing that a bug should be fixed, or a feature should be redesigned, or even that more tests should be run…
The problem is that many times we are afraid to raise our voices and try to persuade the rest of the team to do what we thing is right. And even when we raise our voices we don’t manage to communicate this need clearly to the rest of our team.
Here are some ideas and examples of how to take a stand and do it in a way that will make your team see your point clearly.

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Agile Thinking instead of Agile Testing

By on March 29, 2011 in Best Practices, On-Going Improvement

Is there such a thing as Agile Testing? I’m not sure there is…
You don’t need to work on an agile team to work and test based on an Agile Thinking mindset.

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Testing in 2020 – Part 2

By on February 26, 2011 in Conferences & Seminars, Management, Test Process, Testing Intelligence

Second part of my Testing in 2020 posting series. On this post I explain about the underlying factor creating the change to the Testing (and Development) world, and I explain how the task of the tester will change due to this change.

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Testing in 2020 – Part I

By on February 3, 2011 in Conferences & Seminars, Testing Intelligence

How will software testing look in 2020? This is a question I was asked to talk about in a conference last week.
In this first post I wrote about the way factors that are causing the main changes and wrote in high level about the areas where I see will be biggest changes. In my next post I will write about these changes in more detail.

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Teaching programmers to test

By on December 23, 2010 in Best Practices, Management, Tools

Yesterday I started providing short training sessions for agile programmers who need to learn how to test better.
Would you trust a programmer to test your application? It’s like asking a Fox to guard the chicken-house, right? Well, sometimes you don’t have a choice, or you do but that choice is to release the application untested…

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