Software Testing and Development Blog Posts

“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.

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?