Blog Posts

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 to do with it, but I also suspected a slightly different mental model.

In a previous post I discussed how I managed to do UAT badly in the past. Now I will discuss a generalised model formed from those (and other) experiences, which should allow me to make fewer UAT mistakes in the future.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes over the years when testing. I try not to make each mistake more than once - which usually means any future mistakes require more creativity or stupidity on my part. Here are some UAT mistakes.

For the longest time I didn’t know what dependency injection meant - anytime I looked it up I glazed over thinking it really complicated.

Since I generally present myself as a tester, coupled with my relatively novice status when coding in Java using TDD. I don’t mind writing up my TDD mistakes here.

Now that I know a little about Agile and a little about Lean, I can try to apply the concepts to Software Testing.

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.

What an easy target ISEB makes, it comes in for a lot of criticism. And I think it should. To an outsider like myself the certification train looks like a money spinning exercise, why else keep cranking out certification levels? I wonder what they could do to change my perception…

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 updated notes useful.

At EuroSTAR 2007 Michael Bolton started the conference off with “Why I am not Certified” - Michael had obviously kept more up to date on the ISEB progress than I. I looked at the ISEB site recently, and now I feel uneasy.