A weekly source of software testing news
ISSUE #18 - June 4, 2017
This issue talks about critical reasoning and tester mindset.
Why testing isn’t boring:
https://dojo.ministryoftesting.com/lessons/ten-reasons-why-testing-isn-t-boring
How to test (critique? question? complain about?) software specifications by checking for the “7 deadly sins” (possibly 8). A blast from the past, as the original paper by Bertrand Meyer came out in 1985. As covered by The Morning Paper:
https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/11/08/on-formalisms-in-specifications/
How to ask good questions about software. The first post is just really good, while the second one targets testers specifically.
https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/
https://www.stickyminds.com/article/6-tips-software-testers-asking-questions
What can go wrong with empirical evaluations, i.e. how thinking can lead us astray. The sins of reasoning include: ignorance, inappropriateness, inconsistency; and sins of exposition: inscrutability and irreproducibility. Watch out for these as a tester.
Checklist for starting as a tester on a new project that helps to organize thinking about the new space. Comes with accompanying discussion from testing community:
http://nickytests.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/getting-started-on-testing-project.html
https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/getting-started-on-a-project/739
This post looks at developer mindset and lessons testers can extract from it:
http://testerstories.com/2017/04/development-lessons-ported-to-testing/
Classic testing mistakes, listed back in 1997 - goodness, that’s 20 years ago! Yet the only slightly dated part is on automation, all the other tenets still apply. Short listing is at the end of the post and includes the role of testing; planning; staffing; tester work habits; automation and code coverage.
http://www.exampler.com/testing-com/writings/classic/mistakes.html
Hilarious book that explains the history behind everything that works wrong in Unix (and a few things that work right), quoting emails from the 90s. The UNIX-HATERS Handbook:
http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf
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