I really enjoyed talking with John Willis on his Profound podcast. We talked about testing and the role Deming’s philosophy plays in helping me to test. I learned from the conversation. Thank you, John Willis. Please click on this link to listen to the podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1758599/12422563
Tag Archives: Testing Techniques
Don’t forget to test the steps in the Help documentation!
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 …
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A thought regarding boundary value analysis
“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 …
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The Five S’s create a structure for test automation
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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Using plan-do-study-act to improve testing
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 …
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How to create a simple performance test with Puppeteer
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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Using Ishikawa diagrams to improve quality
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 to deal with a complaint about quality
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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Using the Five Whys 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 …
Testing needs to include the needs of internal and external customers
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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State transition diagrams help to define tests
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 …
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Testing messaging with a decision table
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 …
I often “see” functionality I am testing as a tree diagram
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 …
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Can decision tables help you test API endpoints?
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 …
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How do you decide when to stop testing?
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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