Software Quality Assurance | GESQA Ltd | Wales

Category: Testing 101

  • My Testing Manifesto

    Introduction I read. I read an awful lot. I read books, I read other blogs (most of which seem better than my attempts). I read articles on the agile space. I read developer articles. I read articles on test automation. I read a lot of articles on testing. I read twitter vignettes. Each thing I…

  • When Job Specs Go Bad

    Introduction As someone actively looking for a position I’m becoming increasingly discouraged by job specifications that appear to have little to no relevance in hiring skilled testers. After reviewing job specifications pertaining to quality engineers (in all their multivariate word salad constructions) it’s becoming increasingly clear that *some organisations have little to no idea what…

  • 21st Century Soft Skills – QA Edition – Part 1 – Redux

    What’s the problem? Technology moves at a fair old pace these days. Organisations are overflowing with technical experts promoting the latest bit of shiny. Organisations are overflowing with teams implementing the latest bit of shiny. One thing that gets forgotten about in the race to shinytopia is that the implementation is undertaken by real people.…

  • Automated testing – not all scripts and unicorns

    Introduction There’s a lot written about the benefits of *automated testing. There’s a lot of money to be made by tool vendors. There’s not a lot written about the downside of *automated testing. A well articulated and well implemented test automation approach is a valuable piece of any development effort. I’m not anti-automation as a…

  • The 5th Myth of Software Testing – Zero-defect software is achievable

    Saving the best until last. No, no, with a side of no. 100% defect-free software is impossible (obviously within the context of the complexity/desired outcome/quality goal scale) Any defect policy is ultimately defined by the level of tolerance an end-user is prepared to accept Why set yourself up for failure by positing an unattainable goal?…

  • The art of critical thinking

    Introduction Any team that follows an agile approach is probably cross-functional. If you’re lucky, you will work alongside developers, business analysts and UX specialists. They are specialists in their own right. The expectations of Developers are the implementation and optimisation of the code they create, if you’re very lucky, they will create unit tests alongside…

  • The 1st Myth of Software Testing – Anyone can test

    How hard can it be? If you spend long enough in, or around, an ‘average’ organisation that develops software then these may resonate with you. I would be very surprised if you haven’t heard of at least one of these (or a derivative) at some point in time. 1. Anyone can test software “…” This one is a…

  • The 4th Myth of Software Testing – You don’t need QA specialists

    QA specialists aren’t needed, developers can do the testing just fine There seems to be a trend in the dev-ops-new-kid-on-the-block-whizz-bang-automate-everything-framework that a lot of organisations are adopting in that a dedicated QA function / dedicated QA specialist is not required. There’s a valid argument that a degree of testing can (and should…and must) be undertaken by…

  • The 3rd Myth of Software Testing – Testers are responsible for the quality of the delivered product

    Notwithstanding that very few organisations ever internally define their expectations of quality, even in the brave new world of Agile and DevOps the ‘Testers are responsible for quality‘ axiom seems to be a prevailing anti-pattern. Even with the vast amount of available evidence and the oft-repeated but seldom implemented mantra of the ‘whole team is…

  • The 2nd Myth of Software Testing – Testing == Automation == Quality

    Testing == Automation == Quality The obvious response to this is to reply with: ‘What exactly do you mean by automation?’ Pretty soon and no doubt after some debate, you might arrive at: execution of a test script with no / minimal manual input using a mechanism / toolset for executing a set of predetermined steps…