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Essays

T.O.T.E - Test, Operate, Test, Exit for Software Testing

Wherein the TOTE (Test Operate Test Exit) model is used to explore the nature of feedback and abstraction of test phases and map the TOTE model on to TDD, Exploratory Testing, Design processes, Analysis, Learning, Decision Making and Problem Solving.

Software Testing and Spies in The Art of War

8 minute read - Essays

TLDR; The Art of War Chapter 13, on spies, is directly applicable for interpretation in terms of Software Testing.

Do not look for Cheap Black Friday Deal Testing

8 minute read - Essays

Black Friday means cheap deals.

Testing is already the ‘cheap’ and undervalued relation in Software Development. Testers are paid less than programmers. Testing is outsourced more often and programming because it is seen as less valuable. Testing is viewed as more of a junior role than programming.

Every day is Black Friday for Software Testing.

Proof of Concept vs Minimum Viable Product

8 minute read - Essays

I think most people intuitively know the difference between an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and a POC (Proof of Concept).

But I think that sometimes people start work on an MVP when they should be working on a POC. And sometimes people don’t stop after a POC, they keep adding more features and continue proving more concepts, hoping that they will end up with an MVP.

How to use your testing skills to bag a SNES Classic Mini Pre-Order

6 minute read - Testing Essays

TLDR; Identify Oracles, automate observation of changes, understand GUI/Mobile differences, harness tool support.

Quaere, Heuristics, Mnemonics, and Acronyms

3 minute read - Testing Essays

Don’t limit yourself to a set of attributes and words, seek more, develop strategies for identifying new concepts and ways of exploring them for then you have manifested the spirit of Quaere.

Stop finding simple bugs. Use Automated Validation tools early.

3 minute read - Essays

I recently realised that I wasn’t taking advantage of as many automated validation tools as I could do. Hopefully after reading this post you will question whether your process uses enough automated validation.

An Open Answer to an Open Letter

9 minute read - Essays

TLDR; Condemn? No. Support? I do like parts of the paper. Censor? No.

And now I’m doing something I don’t like: writing a blog post in response to ‘something on the internet’. I’m writing a blog post which I don’t think has any practical value. I warn you now. I don’t think you will find much humour herein either. I have added a comedy punchline at the bottom though, if you want to skip ahead.

Can the words that we use affect our thinking

5 minute read - Psychology Essays

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?

Tom Gilb Competitive Engineering Courses

10 minute read - Essays

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. We also know that the development process is notorious for claiming that users changed their requirements, and kept changing them as the development process continued. So structured processes prefer to avoid change, and extreme processes embrace change.