Blog Posts

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.

Practical Experiences With Graph Based Software Testing

Alan Richardson gave a talk at StarEast 2003 based around his experiences with Graph Based Testing.

You can read the 27 page supporting paper as a pdf file here.

Tool Changes and New Tools

Some tools have new versions since the paper was written and I have stumbled across some new tools.

• Graphopt has a new version
• Tintfu has been updated
• here is another dot editor for windows DynaGraph
• Tulip is designed to visualise large graphs, and uses its own graph file format, but can import from GML. It does have some fairly complicated install dependencies.
• PAJEK is another visualisation tool for large graphs.

Simple Spreadsheet

In the paper I mention how simple it would be to construct a spreadsheet that you can use to create the graphs and use to build extra functionality with.

This is a fantastic phrase, it has been popular and it has worked; testing now starts earlier and testing has a higher profile than ever before, but despite all that, it isn’t what we meant or even what we really needed.

…Meyerhold’s bio-mechanical actor said, “I make these movements because I know that when I make them what I want to do can most easily and directly be done.” [1]

What is a fault?

Software Test Scripting

This essay explores the test scripting in terms of software development as the two processes are very similar and share many of the same techniques and pitfalls. It is primarily aimed at manual test script construction because automated test script construction is software development.

Path Analysis for Software Testing

TLDR; This essay explores the use of graph models in testing and the practice of structural path derivation using 3 coverage concerns: node coverage, link coverage and loop coverage. Predicate coverage is considered but is not covered in detail. An exploration of, and notes on, model path analysis for testing: