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Channel: Thinking – Stories from a Software Tester
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Good Testers Think Operationally

When a professional discipline has a vocabulary for expressing the fundamental concepts on which it’s based, then you have a means for how practitioners in the discipline can make sure they’re talking...

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Testing: Art and Science

I’ve heard a lot of people in the software industry say that “testing is more art than science.” My opinion is that people who say this most likely know little about art and probably know even less...

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Cautionary Tales on Metrics

Some testers — and most managers — like to talk about metrics. One thing that often doesn’t get discussed is what I call metric dissociation. Here’s my thought: metrics should be easily or directly...

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Epistemological Angst (or When Does “Before” Lose Meaning?)

I find myself in a philosophical mood today and it’s based on some experiences with testers that simply don’t ask questions. As testers we have to ask questions. Lots of questions. We also have to...

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Test Teams Need Inventors: Seeing and Thinking Differently

In various posts I’ve tried to show how I believe testers can invent solutions to problems they are encountering. These solutions do not always have to be tool-based in nature. Sometimes you are...

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Test Teams Need Inventors: Balancing Creativity

In a previous post I talked about inventors as people who see and think differently. I also brought the idea of inventors having to institute cultural change in some cases. What I didn’t do is how an...

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Seeing and Thinking Differently

In talking about test teams as inventors, I mentioned that Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else does and thinking something different.” I wanted...

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Testing That is Effective, Efficient, and Elegant

There is notion in quality assurance and testing between verification and validation. Verification asks “Are we building the product right?” Validation asks “Are we building the right product?” Some...

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Combining Activities in a Lifecycle Prism

For those of you who work in agile environments, maybe nothing I say here will be new. Even for those who don’t work in agile environments, you may have found yourself thinking along these lines but...

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Resilient Teams and Systems of Values

One of the worst things that can ever happen to a quality function or test team is a credibility gap. When perceptions of quality take a hit — whether internal or external — you are on a bad path. Here...

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Tester as Learner

I’ve always been interested in the different ways that testers think and how those modes of thinking directly apply to the work testers do. What it comes down to for me is how people learn. This...

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What Can Particle Physics Teach Us About Testing?

Awhile back I talked about being cross-discipline associative. I did something similar to this approach when I asked what time travel could teach us about testing. Let’s see how this works with another...

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What Can Politics Teach Us About Testing?

In the United States we are currently going through one of our normal rounds of political craziness as we move towards a new election. This is not a political blog and I don’t want to add to the crazy....

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Testing Helps Us Understand Physics

In our testing industry we’ve borrowed ideas from the physics realm to provide ourselves some glib phrases. For example, you’ll hear about “Schrödinger tests” and “Heisenbugs.” It’s all in good fun...

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Should Testers Own Quality?

I recently participated in a discussion around the idea of whether testers “own quality” in some sense. The answer to me is obvious: of course not. But an interesting discussion did occur as a result...

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The Copy+Paste Culture

Many companies I’ve been at are in a race to see how much like Spotify they can be and apply concepts of Chapters and Guilds. What I routinely see is companies get this bit wrong. Particularly around...

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