Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
Teams whose focus includes testability are more likely to be high performing.[1] Good testability will “minimize testing costs”[2]. Testability can also be seen as one of the factors that determine quality. When the testability of a feature is discussed people often ask what is meant by testability. The clearest definition of testability I have found …
Continue reading “How can you improve the testability of your product?”
I test the steps in the Help documentation for the functionality that I am testing. It is easy to forget to test the examples in Help. Testing the steps used in Help can be useful in more than one way. It is important that the steps described in Help ‘work’ because they are what the …
Continue reading “Don’t forget to test the steps in the Help documentation!”
“The Art of Software Testing” by Glenford J. Myers is a classic book about software testing and I often use it as a reference. In the book, Glenford J. Myers wrote that “test cases that explore boundary conditions have a higher payoff than cases that do not”[1]. Boundary Value Analysis is a widely used testing …
Continue reading “A thought regarding boundary value analysis”
Testers and developers can use the Deming Cycle to improve the quality of their testing. The Deming Cycle was initially used in the manufacture of telephones and has had a big influence on software development. The cycle has four steps: The cycle should be repeated with the knowledge accumulated. The Deming Cycle can be described …
Continue reading “Using plan-do-study-act to improve testing”
Cause-effect diagrams are a useful technique that can be used to improve quality. Glenford J. Myers wrote that “a weakness of boundary value analysis and equivalence partitions is that they do not explore combinations of input circumstances”[1]. A technique that can be used to explore and describe combinations of inputs to an issue is a …
Continue reading “Using Ishikawa diagrams to improve quality”
The Five Whys is a technique for finding the root cause of a problem. Toyota developed this technique and it is now widely used, including in software development. I was introduced to the Five Whys by Tom Gilb as part of a course he ran on Lean QA and have used the Five Whys in …
When we test we think about the users of the functionality and we include their needs in our testing. Creating categories of customers, such as internal and external, can help us understand our customers’ uses of the functionality. Dr Joseph Juran advocated viewing customers as either internal or external customers. Juran was born in Romania …
Continue reading “Testing needs to include the needs of internal and external customers”
Identifying what states exist in functionality and how changes in state take place enables testers to identify tests that should be executed. State transition diagrams provide simple notation for summarising states and how changes in states take place. I recently used a state transition diagram on a project and it helped me identify the tests …
Continue reading “State transition diagrams help to define tests”
Recently I was testing the messages sent from an app to the user when I noticed that the messages were dependent on the interaction of three conditions. I used a decision table to analyse the messaging because decision tables show how many tests are required to test something that is affected by a group of …
“How Can I Test This?” is a book that contains examples of how to test different sites and apps along with test heuristics applied, the reasoning as well as ideas for which tools will help testing. The book aims to be useful both to new testers and to more experienced testers, and has just been …
Continue reading “How Can I Test This? an app with microservices”
Creating a tree diagram can be a helpful way to visualise functionality that is accessed via hierarchical structures like menus and the tree diagrams can help to plan testing. In my mind’s eye I often see functionality as a tree diagram. C.S French says that trees are “hierarchical data structures rather like the familiar family …
Continue reading “I often “see” functionality I am testing as a tree diagram”
I recently saw a comment about how testers should be able to use decision tables to aid their testing. I decided to refresh my understanding of them and these are the notes I created about them. Decision tables are an analytical tool. They are used to describe logic and can be helpful in understanding the …
Continue reading “Can decision tables help you test API endpoints?”
Identifying risks to their work helps development teams. Recently I spoke to a team who had talked through the ways in which their work could fail, and built on this to identify risks to their work. The team adapted Failure Modes Effects Analysis (FMEA) to suit their needs. FMEA is a technique that is used …
Continue reading “How can you work with your team to identify risks?”
There is always more testing that can be done on a feature but there are reducing returns on testing a feature over time. At some point you need to stop testing, and the question as to when to stop is sometimes a difficult call. Also, sometimes there is more than one feature to be tested. …
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