Yes, Virginia, Software Fails – a journey of software failures and testing solutions
The power and fatal weakness of software is its ultimate malleability. It can be quickly and easily changed by drastic degrees. This one inescapable aspect would be good cause to abandon software entirely if it weren’t for its extreme power to make our machines do …
Integration Testing – The Software Meets the Road
Where unit tests are deeply involved in the functionality of individual code modules, the integration test process is focused on the system as a whole and the complete combination of those modules. It is deeply concerned with how they communicate with each other. As its …
7 Awesome Exploratory Testing Tools
Exploratory testing is defined as simultaneous learning, test design, and test execution and the heart of manual testing. Exploratory testing values the tester as an integral part of the test process, like the Agile Manifesto states: “Individuals and interactions over tools and processes.”
In a …
3 Tips to Ensure Unit Testing Success
The name, Unit Testing, accurately conveys the idea of testing something smaller than a working system. It refers to testing code modules that perform isolatable unique functions. In today’s programming parlance, these are typically called objects. They represent functionality that is specific enough to be …
What Can Risk-based Software Testing Do For Your Business?
Risk-based testing (RBT) is exactly what it sounds like, testing your software based on risk. We know from last week’s blog that circular definitions like this annoy me, so let’s break RBT down to some measurable components.
The first and most obvious question is: what …
Software Quality Metrics You Should Be Tracking
Businesses, especially software-centric businesses, have dramatically increased the velocity of their operations. Software development itself has gone from bi-annual version updates to weekly releases via the Agile methodology. Managing this eye-watering rate of change has brought every business function to the necessity of monitoring Key …
Failing at Requirements-Based Software Testing?
Often, requirements-based software testing is defined something like this: “a testing approach in which test cases, conditions and data are derived from requirements.” This sort of circular explanation is annoying — and unhelpful.
What are Software Requirements?
Google defines requirements as “a thing that is …
3 Ways to Mitigate the Risks of Automated Testing
Test automation holds the promise of enormous benefits for improving product and service quality. It applies computational power to what it does best, the repetitive exercise of software systems. And, like any other powerful tool, misusing it is fraught with risk.
Software development has progressed …
Fast Food and the Crowdsourced Software Testing Phenomenon
Crowdsourced usability testing has marketing appeal. They hook you with mentions of the big players…Adobe, Jet, Oracle, and more. On the surface it looks good. You simply sign-up (and pay a fee), submit some questions, and your tests are magically sent to on-demand users who …
Outsourced Software Testing: Friend or Foe?
The standard argument for outsourcing has been done to death. As in, “We all get it. ‘Nuff said.” The term itself originated in the 80’s to describe contracting with external entities to provide “an exchange of services, expertise, and payments”. Outsourcing, in its most basic …
Is Scriptless Test Automation All It’s Cracked Up to Be?
The Agile software development methodology has compressed the traditional months-long software development cycle into days. To support that kind of release speed requires QA testing to be performed concurrently with development, often with test planning done even before the first line of system code is …
How to Write a Software Test Case Like a Pro
Writing software test cases isn’t something to take lightly. Aside from coding and testing your app, writing test cases is the third ingredient to consider in the ‘successful release’ triumvirate. Does this sound like a lot of pressure to place on a task often regarded …