Evil Tester

The following contains a true life summary of some recent testing to illustrate the use of Fiddler and some test thinking in action.
I know I have mentioned Fiddler 2 before and how I could not test web sites without it (OK, so I could but I’d use something like BurpSuite instead), but I like Fiddler […]

I still remember my first real test.
Do you?
Since I generalise wildly, I assume that you do.
Note: my first ‘real’ test. Not “the first time I found a bug”. For the purposes of this exercise I defined my first ‘real’ test as the first time I can remember purposefully thinking like a tester with regards to […]

Looking back at ETA I can see that my current approach to documenting exploratory testing has changed since I last worked on ETA.
Back then I remember my style as:

what did I just do?
what did I just observe?
scribbled thoughts on paper

I kind of scribbled future thoughts on bits of paper off to the side as […]

After the discussion about passion and interviewing testers I started to rethink how I conduct interviews and I think that in the future I will use MS Paint as an application to see how candidates approach testing.
A long time ago, I wrote my own little app for use during interviews. You can play with […]

Any curious tester can find a number of published heuristic documents out there on the web (James Bach, Elisabeth Hendrickson)
‘Heuristics’ appear regularly on blog posts. (Mike Kelly, Ainars Galvans, Scott Barber, David Gilbert)
In this post I aim to show you an easy way of identifying new test ideas without recourse to heuristics, on a case […]

Brief Therapy (and other therapeutic models) provides me with some useful ‘heuristics’, approaches and techniques to apply during my testing.
Brief Therapy - often called Solutions Focused Therapy concentrates on moving the client towards the ’solution’ that they want to achieve through the therapy process. Different from problem focused therapy which concentrate on the problems […]

A little history… As I did my best to teach a tester how to write test ideas for an Agile story I found myself wondering why I found coming up with ideas and questions a fairly easy activity and why they seemed not to find it quite so easy. Practice would have had something […]

Abstractions can put your testing in danger if you don’t handle them correctly. So some hints and tips on handling the abstraction known as an ‘equivalence class’ may help.

While trawling through my hard drive on a deletion frenzy, I found my old notes on what I did to pass the ISEB foundation exam. Bear in mind that I made these notes in 2003 and the ISEB syllabus has moved on since. But I have updated all the links and someone might find my […]

Make it free to Learn – open source implementations of languages.
Don’t use a traditional programming book – too slow.
Learn it to do something – be focused.
Ask for help.

More helpful hints and links inside…