When I am consulted for automated testing projects, I often find that the teams are familiar with unit tests and whole-system tests (think end-to-end tests driven through the GUI, designed to replace manual tests). However I find that teams have trouble defining tests in between the sizes of “unit” and “everything”. Developers sometimes start from […]
Since getting into Dungeons & Dragons tabletop gaming this year, a few people in the software development and testing community have chatted to me about parallels between D&D and software development. In particular, there has been some interest around the way players are assigned roles, skill levels and abilities – does this sound like your […]
This is my favorite talk that I’ve ever done. I presented it at the Business of Software conference in Boston last year. The audience were business people – company founders, CEOs, CTOs, folks like that. So it’s also the best description I have yet of the kind of work I do, aimed at people who […]
I was recently interviewed by Fog Creek Software’s blog about embedded testers in development teams. Check it out here to listen to me rant about how software testing needs to be a core competency of the software engineering discipline. Note: I mentioned a book in this interview “Driven by tests” but I got the name horrifically […]
The keynote I presented at CAST 2014 has been uploaded and you can watch it here. CAST was a really great conference – I had an amazing time and had so many thoughtful conversations with some very clever people.
I’ve been interviewed by my buddy Ben Morgan on his podcast Hack and Heckle. Ben was a pal of mine at university. One of my first memories of Ben was when he confronted my friend Jo and I at the uni pub for running out of his databases tutorial when his back was turned. In […]
Last year I started working on a small team with developers that really value testing and treat it as in integral part of the development cycle. I’ll never forget one of our first planning meetings when we were discussing a feature that we were about to build and a developer frowned and said “Yeah, but […]
I recently came back from teaching a day-long workshop at the Eurostar Conference in Gothenburg. My wonderful co-host Jim Holmes and I wanted to talk about becoming a testing craftsman. Jim was inspired by the software craftsmanship movement to create this workshop. I think the concept from this community that has resonated most with both […]
Recently I found myself in a familiar testing situation – a developer had made a change to a feature that required testing by visual comparison. Hours of tedious, repetitive manual testing awaited me. Campaign Monitor is a web app that allows users to import an HTML page and send it as an email to a […]
Recently, a link came my way about Aspiritech, a testing company that only hires testers with Asperger’s Syndrome or high-functioning Autism. I’d heard of companies like this before, and was curious about the advantages and limitations of this testing approach, and about what made software testing so suited to this demographic. So I expressed some […]
