Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

I have started to move the site over to WordPress, starting with the blog entries and during the conversion process I remembered to re-learn a little bit about SQL.

Note: 20200605 This is a aggregate of three older posts on AutoIt (from 2006). I last used AutoIt seriously about 10 years ago. I have written applications as well as tactical test solutions using AutoIt. Sadly AutoIt is Windows only, and I primarily use cross platform or Mac solutions at the moment. But, if I needed to perform some fast adhoc Windows GUI automation or simple utility creation. I’d start with AutoIt. I updated the scripts here to work on the current version of AutoIt.

How do the different words we use to describe a system, change the way that we think about that system? Can we describe the Application Under Test differently and change the way that we think about it?

A presentation of my interpretation of context driven testing, particularly to non-testers and what they can expect from their testers when the testers become context driven.

Presentation to be delivered at the North London BCS 16th March 2005

There are 3 pdfs:

1. Draft paper .pdf.
2. Slide Handouts .pdf these are the presentation slide handouts
3. Long presentation slides .pdf Slides for the long presentation version (not delivered)

Some basic ’things’ which have come out of preparing this paper, for me, are summarised below and are hopefully clearer in the pdfs.

“A Test Tool is Any Tool that can help me, in any way, with my Testing.”

A related stickyminds.com paper is Being Resourceful When Your Hands are Tied which was co-written with Danny Faught.

This page is the supporting page for a talk, and paper, on Alternative Testing Tools.

On various pages on this site you will find tools mentioned that are not part of the mainstream cannon of testing tools. I tend to think of these as Alternative Testing Tools. But I wanted to investigate what that phrase really meant to me.

Back in 2004, Danny Faught and I collaborated on an article for Better Software, about how to use tools when you have no budget, or people will not let you install anything. The article was entitled “Being Resourceful when your hands are tied”.

The January 2004 edition of Professional Tester contains an article about self education and practise. The article was entitled “Help Yourself”.

This page is the supporting page for the talk that I gave at EuroStar 2003 on becoming a better tester, specifically by beta testing software.

You can

• download the paper, or the presentation.
• Find links to all the tools and web sites mentioned.
• Read Additional Points and information not in the paper.

The Paper and Presentation

[Paper .pdf (975kb)] [presentation .pdf (227kb)]

Additional Points

Some of these points have come out from comments made by the reviewers of the paper (thanks: James Lyndsay, Robert Sabourin, James Bach) and through my continued use of beta testing and thinking about beta testing since the paper was written.

Requirements are a tricky business.

As testers, we know that a lot of the ‘finished’ requirements we see require investigation on our part to find out ‘how’ we can actually test them and to get to the core of what the requirement actually means.