Software Testing Articles, Blog Posts, Books, Podcasts and Quotes
Many organizations are currently using an Agile approach to software development. In this context, small teams are recommended with an emphasis on collaboration between team members and cross-functional people. In this blog post, Rob Lambert discusses the actual skills of software testers and how they go beyond software testing, producing what is call a “t-shaped tester”.
Writing and keeping up to date documentation in software development projects has always been a problem. In this blog post, Jim Bird discusses the idea of using automated tests to document a software system. He also ask the questions: what do tests document? who will find this documentation useful?
Answering an article saying that you cannot use exploratory testing in Agile, Huib Schoots tries to explain what exploratory testing is and why it is suitable to perform this activity in an Agile context.
Pex is a Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools that help Unit Testing .NET applications. Pex automatically generates test suites with high code coverage. Right from the Visual Studio code editor, Pex finds interesting input-output values of your methods, which you can save as a small test suite with high code coverage. Microsoft Code Digger is a Visual Studio 2012 that analyzes possible execution paths through your .NET code. The result is a table where each row shows a unique behavior of your code. The table helps you understand the behavior of the code, and it may also uncover hidden bugs.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is an approach used in software testing to identify the root causes of defects or problems and address them instead of treating the symptoms. It’s a process that grew out of accident investigations to become a standard feature of hardware engineering. If something is broken, instead of just fixing it at the point of discovery, let’s investigate and try to fix the underlying cause at the point of origin. This principle is applicable for software development and software testing, so much so, that it could have been developed to deal with software defects.
Distributed software development teams and distributed software testing are here to stay. In this article, Lisa Crispin asks “How do we get quality software in these situations?” and proposes some hints on how to get good results when you perform software testing with distributed teams.
Automating tests is an investment that is valuable as long as the investment is not too great. As such investing in automated testing tools can be great or bad depending on if your company really needs to automate. We want to get to the payback more quickly. The true investment is not only the cost of creating and maintaining automated tests. Watir is a family of libraries for testing web applications. Watir reduces the cost of creating automated tests that are maintainable. If we spend too much time fixing and debugging, we will never get the new features created, or we will abandon the automated tests temporarily.