Process

I was asked a question over email, and I’m paraphrasing the essence as, “given our project issues what tool can we use to automatically pull out all this data and automate the app to let us test it properly?”.

Unfortunately most of the time, when I’m asked this, the answer isn’t what people want to hear.

I believe that everyone has a unique and personal test process. Also, when we accept this, we can grow our testing skills further and faster than if we pursue the traditional path of learning a common body of knowledge.

Have you had anyone ask you a question about estimation? I get asked these types of questions and I suspect that the person really wants answers about how to communicate and justify their guesses.

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.

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.

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.