Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
“Architect of Quality”[1] is the autobiography of Dr Joseph Juran. Juran’s autobiography is the moving story of a Romanian immigrant to the USA who rose from poverty to being a world leader in quality and receiving honours from the Emperor of Japan and the President of the USA. Those of us who work in quality …
Continue reading “A review of Dr Joseph Juran’s autobiography: “Architect of Quality””
I use the Five S’s to create a disciplined structure that helps me create and maintain automated tests. Mary and Tom Poppendiek recommend using the Five S’s to create the discipline necessary to develop quality software. They wrote that “the five S’s are a classic lean tool to organise a workspace” [1]. Mary and Tom …
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I have recently automated some tests using Playwright. It is a free-to-use Node.js library created by Microsoft that is designed to be used to automate end-to-end testing. Playwright supports chromium, WebKit and Firefox, and, by default, all tests are run on all three browsers. Tests can be run in headless mode. It supports, Java, .Net, …
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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”
Creating your first performance test can seem daunting, but it need not be so. This blog post is a guide to resources that you can use to create a simple automated performance test. A good tool to use to create a performance test is Puppeteer. Puppeteer is a node.js library that can be used to …
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I have just been the Programme Secretary for BCS SIGiST’s conference “Testing, Diversity, AI”, and it seems useful to share some of my thoughts on organising the conference. Firstly it was a rewarding thing to do. I have worked in testing for twenty years and it was good to give something back to the testing …
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If we want to make good quality software we need to remove barriers to good work. Dr Deming‘s 14 Points for management were the basis for lessons for top management in Japan. Dr Deming said that “the 14 Points apply anywhere, to small organisations as well as to large organisations[1]”. Point 12 is to “remove …
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 …
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How a company responds to a complaint about quality needs careful consideration. A model that we can use to explore this issue is Dr Deming’s Red Beads Experiment. We can extend the Red Beads Experiment to include a complaint from customers. I explored the Red Beads Experiment in a previous blog post The blog post …
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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 …
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I enjoy working in an organisation where we are learning from the work we do. An example of this would be using retrospectives to enable the team to learn from their work and taking this knowledge forward to help the team. Until recently I have called this approach continuous learning. It sounded right, as it …
I want to improve my understanding of systems thinking as this will help my testing. My friend John Holmstrom recommended the work of Peter Senge and so I have just read “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter Senge. The book contains many useful insights about system thinking, learning and leadership. Some of the points about systems …
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I have always gained a lot from attending conferences, and it has now been over two years since I attended a conference in person. I am now enjoying being Programme Secretary for BCS SIGiST’s Testing, Diversity, AI Conference. Over the last two and a bit years I have attended, spoken at and organised virtual events. …
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