Tag Archives | Communication

One metric = One Big Mistake

By on November 14, 2011 in Communication, Metrics & Statistics, Testing Intelligence

Sometimes measuring only one thing can be worst than not measuring anything at all.

Whenever you work with metrics you need to remember that it is not as easy as waving a number and having everyone agreeing with you on the conclusion of your observation. You need to take into account that some people, specially those who have something to loose with your findings, will try to show why you are wrong (and they are right!)

Here are some quick pointers on how to succeed with your metrics based observations in your (political) workplace.

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What do you do when a ShowStopper escapes into production?

By on August 9, 2011 in Best Practices, Management, On-Going Improvement

When you are a true professional, you see failure as an opportunity to become a better professional. Here’s a real life scenario, let’s see how many of you can relate to it: It is the middle of the day on a regular Tuesday afternoon.  You are the QA Manager of a company developing an Enterprise [...]

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Coordinating your automated and manual test management

By on June 6, 2011 in Automation, Communication, Management

After getting good and important feedback on the post I did a couple of weeks ago around Manual & Automatic Testing I decided to write a summary with the additional inputs and challenges I got from the field.
I also added some of the ides and points to be taken into account in order to successfully coordinate your manual and automated testing efforts.

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Testers!! know your Business (and don’t do that of others!)

By on May 23, 2011 in Best Practices, Bug Reporting

Some time ago I wrote a blog post called “Principles of good bug reporting” that talked about the basic things that make a good bug and helps testers not make the typical mistakes that then to make other members of our teams criticize our bug reports.

Jerry Weinberg commented on this blog saying among other things “I don’t think testers should be prioritizing bugs”, and looking back at what I wrote I now agree with him, I was only half right on asking tester to set their severity and priority grades correctly.

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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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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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