Mike Harris' Testing and Quality Blog
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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The Ministry of Testing Bloggers Club has asked bloggers to write a post that describes t three things that have helped them in their testing career. Many things have helped me in my testing career, and here are three of them: The Testing Community The Testing Community has helped me throughout my testing career. I …
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It is helpful for a tester to be able to program as it enables a tester to get a better understanding of the application they are testing. Being able to code also helps create test data, automate tests and build a better relationship with developers. But which programming language(s) should a tester learn? Over the …
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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 …
“Artificial intelligence and Software Testing” is edited by Adam Leon Smith and has recently been published by the British Computer Society. The book covers both using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to test software and testing AI systems. The book will help testers who want to learn about AI and testing. Rex Black writes in the introduction …
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When I started as a tester I learned that test documentation, such as test plans, needed to gain approval from the Director and could be regarded as a project deliverable. I have learned that this is not helpful and that test documentation should support testing and the development. I remember that, before testing started, we …
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If you have not tested an API then starting to test an API can feel quite daunting as you may feel that you need strong technical skills for this type of testing. You can, however, start to test your API easily and then learn technical skills to test the API. An API is an application …
“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 …
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Sometimes testers need to “coach” and when I do I use a coaching framework to help me. At the weekend I coach junior cricket and I use what I have learned from cricket to help me as a tester. The PoP framework we use in coaching cricket can be useful to us as testers. In …
Joseph Juran wrote in the 5th Edition that Juran’s Quality Handbook ”is a reference book for all who are involved with quality of products, services, and processes”. I find it a useful book to refer to if I am thinking about a problem. There are eight editions of the Juran’s Quality Control Handbook. They are …
Engineering teams often keep metrics on their work, but are these metrics always helpful?. Metrics could be something that the manager or director has asked for or metrics something that the team has created to help the team. I have found that creating metrics on quality is something testers often do. Creating useful metrics is …
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Jobs Theory gives us a way of understanding clients by asking what job did they “hire” a product or service for. An example of Jobs Theory is given in “Competing Against Luck”: by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan. The example they give explains why people “hired” milk shakes. Research …
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