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My Software Under Test and Other Animals


What feels like a zillion years ago I wrote a few pieces for the Ministry of Testing's Testing Planet newspaper. Understandably, they've since mostly been replaced with much better stuff on the Dojo but MoT have kindly given me permission to re-run them here.

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Let's not kid ourselves; we know that software always ships with bugs in it and that we’re likely to be asked about the release-worthiness of the current build at some point in the release cycle. Putting aside the question of whether or not testers should be making go/no-go release decisions, we have to be able to give a coherent, credible and useful response to that kind of request.

Such a response will be part of your testing or product story at a level appropriate to the person who asked. You might talk about whatever metrics you’re required to produce, or produce for your own benefit (and the value you perceive them to have) and perhaps performance requirements such as execution speed for important use cases, stability and robustness. You might refer back to initial requirements or specification items or user stories that didn’t make it or that didn’t make it entirely and if you have it, include feedback from any beta programmes, internal users, your operations team and so on ...

Read the rest of the ebook at My Software Under Test and Other Animals.
Image: Ministry of Testing

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