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.

--00--

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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Not Strictly for the Birds

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ChatGPTesters

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the T...

Vanilla Flavour Testing

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Build Quality

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in gener...

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