Tester in Agile

A car, crash tested inside the box.

Someone asked me what should happen to the testers now that the developers were moving to Agile. How should they handle the new situation? This is how I answered: I think your best bet would be to integrate with the development teams. Here are two things you could start thinking…

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Budget for Technical Debt Reduction

If you do not take care of technical debt reduction, you will end up like this house.

The foolish man builds his house on loose sand but the rains and the winds will crash it. (Matthew 7:24-27) Things have not changed that much in the last two thousand years. Technical debt remains a major challenge for software development teams.

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How detailled should a test case be?

I sort of remembered a very interesting article about one-liner test cases at testzonen.se. I have blogged about it before, but perhaps it is worth repeating myself? The idea is that detailled (manual, scripted) test cases are uninteresting, limit creativity and are expensive to maintain. The solution is to create “one liner” test cases instead. What about test documentation? If testing actions are recorded during execution then the documentation can be created afterwards.

I guess this goes to show that there is no one size fits all in testing. The right tool should be used at the right time to reach the right goal – which of course is to find bugs early rather than late.

TDD Improves Quality

Test Driven Development: Ten Years Later - Steve Freeman, Michael Feathers

TDD improves quality! That might sound obvious, but evidently it isn’t. Test driven development (TDD) is often cited as a key agile practice (1,2). But still, the evidence has been equivocal until now.

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Regression Test Selection Twenty Years

Last year Regression Test Selection celebrated its twentieth year as a field of research. It was in 1993 that G Rothermel and MJ Harrold published their seminal paper on regression test selection. With Continuous Integration being the top agile practice, RTS remains important. How did scholars celebrate “regression test selection…

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Regression Test Selection

Regression Test Selection or RTS is essential for successful regression testing in larger projects. As long as you are running a small project and working with a small product regression testing is seldom seen as an issue. As your project and product grows and matures your regression test suite becomes…

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Is a Driver’s License a Unit Test?

Is it appropriate to call a driver’s license a unit test? Would that be consistent with unit testing best practices? That was part of the discussion that erupted on our internal Yammer network after someone posted a link to coding by numbers. I argued that a driver’s license was not…

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Automated Bug Fixing, Innovation and the Small World of SE Research

With automated bug fixing, we can automatically fix 50% of all bugs at a cost of $8. A fantastic research result from the small world of Software Engineering research. But how can we turn these inventions into innovations? References [bibtex file=http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/greger/tag/20120308?fieldmap=posted-at:posted-date&clean_urls=0]

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What is the ROI of Testing?

A question that pops up now and then is “What is the ROI of testing?” A Korean research paper from December 2011 tries to answer the question.

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Do We Listen too Much to the “Business”?

Yesterday I watched a documentary on National Geographic about the infamous Sampoong Dept Store Collapse. It immediately got me thinking of some of the threads running here on testing and the business case for testing. In Agile and in our industry in general we always say that fulfilling business requirements…

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