Tag Archives: software testing

The Doublecheckers

Exhausted after fifteen hours of preparing a CD product that had to ship that day, one last little error was found, and fixed. “It’s good to go!” said the person who fixed it. It was 11 p.m. on a Friday … Continue reading

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Archaeology of SDLC

There are some great names among the founders of the still-nascent field, industry, and profession of Software Testing & Quality Assurance: Dave Gelperin, Boris Beizer, Glenford Myers, Rick Craig, and Lee Copeland, to name a few. A name not often … Continue reading

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Thanksgiving, Football, and Web Development

Thanksgiving reminds me of many things for which I am grateful. Thanksgiving is a time to count blessings, and a time to use football analogies for software projects. As the stuffing settles, and the games are on, my thoughts naturally … Continue reading

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QA vs. QC

Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) have some overlap but for the most part they are very different. Here are some differences between QA and QC I can think of off the top of my head.

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Road Rallies & Software Testing

In the current phase of projects at work, a lot of people around me have been traveling, either from elsewhere to here, or from here to other places around the globe. Also a lot of others are taking summer vacation … Continue reading

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Binary Is Always and Never

“Binary Is Always and Never” — A better binaryesque statement would be “Binary is Always OR Never” but it would be less accurate. Many functions, thoughts, events, behaviors, appear stream-like, flowing, complicated, with millions of molecular, intellectual and motivational subtleties.

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Frankenstein and the Agile Casserole

What’s Agile? The word itself sounds upbeat, fast, and flexible. In fact, it sounds agile. No wonder almost every company and person in the known world today declares that it “Does Agile.” The concept has been accepted and embraced almost … Continue reading

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User Stories

Everyone likes a user story. People nowadays equate user stories with Agile or AMDD. But of course the same thing must be done in every software development project, whether waterfall, agile, or something else.

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Use Case vs. Test Case (with a sidenote on Requirements Traceability)

A Use Case is not a substitute for a Test Case. I start with this point because there is a growing trend of organizations using Use Cases as Test Cases. Writing Use Cases takes a lot less time, requires fewer … Continue reading

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Pipelines and Smoketests

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We smoketest a new build for a quickie reassurance that new fixes basically worked, and did not introduce new side-effect errors. Failing a smoketest tells us the code still has a fire to put out.

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Type “P” Personality

Planning fills the air with joy and clarity. I’ve planned everything from building a bookshelf, to going to college, to setting up my curriculum, to researching a thesis, to having children, to buying a house, to re-roofing a house, to … Continue reading

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Shoulds and Shouldn’ts

Don’t you hate it when people say that you “should do this” and “shouldn’t do that”? I do, especially when they are saying it in a Requirements Document. “Should” can mean a lot of things, but it doesn’t mean “require.”

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Measuring the Window

I was having a window replaced at my house. But it wasn’t a normal window, it was a triple-layer fog-proof 20 ft. x 4 ft. window. Of course, my window space isn’t exactly 20 ft., it’s 19 ft., 53/64 inches. … Continue reading

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A Question of Context

There are several “schools of thought” in software testing. People who rigidly adhere to one school are very idealistic about a theory of software testing. Older and wiser testers mix and match schools, styles, systems, theories, practices, to fit each … Continue reading

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