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DevelopSense Blog

Observations on software testing and quality, by Michael Bolton

Interviewing the ProgramNovember 30

Testing, in the quick definition that James Bach and I use, is questioning a product in order to evaluate it. One way of questioning the product is to ask ordinary questions about it, and then to operate it—supplying it with input of some kind, and operating it in some way. The product "answers" us by producing output or otherwise exhibiting behaviour, which we observe and evaluate. Another way of questioning a product is to ask questions about some dimension of it. If we want to do excellent testing, it helps to remember that our product is not merely a program consisting of code that our team wrote. The product is a system. That system includes the program, the platforms upon which the program depends, the person using the program, and the task or business process that the program enables. The system also includes everything that we know about the system.

In the agile community, there appears to be a strong focus on writing tests, often before the code is written. For programmers, especially those using Test-Driven Development—a design activity and a programming activity—this makes a good deal of sense. The TDD experts suggest writing a test, and the writing the least amount of code possible to make the test pass. If the test doesn't pass, refine the code until the test passes (along with all the previous tests), and then repeat the process. Add tests and code as you develop an unde

Going to VancouverNovember 25

I'm off to Vancouver, British Columbia, teaching Rapid Software Testing to a corporate client the week of December 8. Live near there? Want to get together and chat about testing? I'll be there Monday through Friday nights. Drop a line to me at mb@michaelbolton.net.

We Won An Award!November 24

I'm ambivalent about honours. Recognition is nice, but I'm skeptical about the notion of winning over other worthy nominees. Nonetheless, at the EuroSTAR conference, I accepted the inaugural EuroSTAR 2008 CapGemini Award for Innovation, recognizing the most innovative track session, for my talk Two Futures of Software Testing. We won!

Who won? Well, I did for the presentation itself, but James Bach, Cem Kaner, and Jerry Weinberg share credit for the themes and key points of the presentation. Thanks to them. The award was voted on by EuroSTAR's attendees, so they won too. That's because I'd like to believe that they voted less for the presentation and more for what it offered: a bright future of testing that is in contrast to the dark future that is so much like today. So thank you to the attendees.

Thank you also to Bob van de Burgt, EuroSTAR 2008's Conference Chair; to the EuroSTAR staff; to CapGemini; and to all of the people with whom I've had such interesting conversations over the years. About the future: we can't predict it, but we're all in it together.

Heuristics Art Show, EuroSTAR 2008November 13

Galvanized by Jerry Weinberg's workshop on experiential learning at AYE 2008, I led a tutorial at EuroSTAR 2008 that included an experiential exercise invented by my colleague James Bach. I call it The Heuristics Art Show.

In small groups, people contributed, discussed, and refined headlines and descriptions of some of their heuristics, mostly to do with testing, but also to do with other aspects of life and software development. It was wonderful to tap the collective wisdom and experience in the room, and I think the results were marvelous. Many thanks to all who contributed to the exercise.

The pictures are up there in high-res form. Some of them are a little blurry, but they're all readable if you download the high-res version. One fine day I hope to transcribe them—or maybe a Kindly Contributor could do it.

The Art Show approach reminds me of the positive deviance initiative—a from-the-bottom-up, practice-based approach to process improvement. Wanna get better results in a hurry? Don't bring in the massive, unreadable tomes of "maturity" models; have real people, doing real jobs, share their practices with each other. The PD Web site has a great example; follow the

Schools of Testing and Schools of MusicNovember 10

There's been a lot of controversy on the schools of software testing lately, in Paul Gerrard's blog here and here and here; in James Bach's blog here and to some extent here, and on the software-testing mailing list. I also had a pleasant chat with Paul Gerrard at coffee break and lunch today at EuroSTAR 2008.

Jonathan Kohl and I did a paper on the parallels between testing and music at CAST 2008; you can find it in the .PDF of the proceedings. Maybe something about music can offer us a way out of the dilemma.

There are lots of ways of approaching music, as a performer, a listener, or a critic. (I use the word "critic" in the sense of someone who tries to understand, describe and contextualize the work, not in the sense of someone who tries to disparage it,