Vondran Andre's Blog – January 2008 Archive (34)

Problem…

My experience as a tester shows that the nastiest bugs are often discovered by manual testing. But when you do discover them manually, the best strategy is to write automated tests for them, so that you'll check your application in that particular area…

Many of the tests that currently use browser-driving tools like Selenium, Watir…

Problem…

What is agile testing? Put simply it is the close collaboration between the test writer and the developers to ensure test scripts can both be rapidly created and are robust.…

Q1: Why use Agile methods?

Because they work. If they don't work in your organization, there's no reason whatsoever to use them—certainly not so you can brag about being "agile."…

Acceptance Tests

Write the acceptance tests (meaning any tests needed beyond unit and integration tests: system, functional, end-to-end, performance, security, whatever) during the planning phases of the project, rather than after…

Whether or not you attend the meetings, you can add value to the project by ‘testing’ the documentation.

This isn’t an XP concept, but it is linked to flushing out hidden assumptions during XP planning games.

One way to test documents is to read through the document, writing a list of assertions.

For example, maybe you’re reading requirements for an order entry system and have come up with these assertions:

• "The system will capture the customer service…

Most projects begin with some kind of requirements gathering. The business experts may write business requirements.

This is often followed by the development team producing…

Earlier in this article I referred to the values by which XP teams develop software.

• Communication
• Simplicity
• Feedback
• Courage

Some people have added their own values to this list – the one I liked best is ‘enjoyment’.

Extreme Programming is the only ‘official’ agile method I have actually practiced, but from what I have learned of agile software development in general, you can always turn to these values for…

After my rewarding, if challenging, experience as a tester on XP teams, the bad economic times caught up with me and I had to take a job back on the "dark side".

Oh, my new company was great and they were interested in XP, but they were a tiny shop with a huge job to do and it felt to me like barely controlled chaos.

My initial attempts to apply XP practices, such as having daily XP-style stand-ups with my test team, were disasters. I just had to hunker…

The biggest difference between XP projects and most ‘traditional’ software development projects is the concept of test-driven development. With XP, every chunk of code is covered by unit tests, which must all pass all the time. The absence of unit-level and regression bugs means that testers actually get to focus on their job: making sure the…

Here are some activities testers perform on XP teams.

•Negotiate quality with the customer (it’s not YOUR standard of quality, it’s what the customer desires and is willing to pay for!)

•Clarify stories, flush out hidden assumptions

•Enable accurate estimates for both programming and testing tasks

•Make sure the acceptance tests verify the quality specified by the customer

•Help the team automate tests

•Help the team produce testable code

•Form an…

I found that XP testing was different in many ways from ‘traditional’ testing. The biggest difference is that on an XP project, the entire development team takes responsibility for quality. This means the whole team is responsible for all testing tasks, including acceptance test automation. When testers and programmers work together, the…

Historically, testing has always been about finding where the software breaks. In fact, when we talk about the qualities of a good tester we quote anecdotes about how "she was able to break my program in 3 minutes" or that "he found 27 bugs when running on Linux…

In the rocket-fast late 90s, I struggled with using traditional software process and testing practices on e-commerce applications. Then I read Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained and had an amazing ‘aha’ moment. Ron Jeffries sums it up best:

Extreme Programming is a…

Some type of unique company generated number to identify this summary report, its level

and the level of software that it is related to. Preferably the report level will be the same as…

From time to time I see questions on different forums asking what skills are necessary for performance testers. There were pretty interesting discussions. Looks like most experts agree that performance testing requires more skills than just knowledge about how to create a script for a particular load testing tool. While it is still possible to imagine a…

Defect can be caused by a flaw in the application software or by a flaw in the application specification. For example, unexpected (incorrect) results can be from errors made during the construction phase, or from an algorithm incorrectly defined in the specification. Testing is commonly assumed to mean executing software and…

The purpose of business risk analysis during software testing is identifying…