Posts Tagged ‘software testing’
Let’s distinguish between systems where the hazards of failure are material (critical) and those that are not. If it bugs don’t matter, they don’t matter. As the question (posed in a LinkedIn forum) asks about safety and security, we’re talking about critical systems.
There is a long standing debate in reliability engineering…
Read MoreWe don’t need a miracle cure for rogue algorithms. More regulation will not prevent them. Proven software engineering and testing will.
Read MoreEvery time I read about another high profile system outage, I wonder what was missed during development and testing.
For example, although an unusual natural disaster triggered the recent Amazon cloud services outage, the root cause was a lurking bug that could have been revealed with a testing strategy that I (and others) have…
I’ve developed a systematic methodology to design a mobile app test suite and offer an online course that teaches this methodology. http://www.udemy.com/how-to-test-mobile-apps/ The course assumes manual testing, but is completely applicable to testing with any automated tool. Click here to view the course notes, which incude a list of specific…
Read MoreA few days ago, I participated in a panel discussion on open source tools for testing at the QUEST conference with the two founders of Selenium: Jason Huggins of Sauce Labs and Simon Stewart of Google.
Before the panel started we chatted a bit with the moderator. We couldn’t come up with…
Technical Equity is the value that accrues when a software system is well-formed. Instead of burdening you with unnecessary excess cost, your codebase works for you. Technical equity pays dividends: you avoid wasted effort and the consequences of buggy releases, and gain the advantage of releasing sooner and/or with more features,…
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Technical Bankruptcy occurs when technical debt overwhelms the maintainers of a software system. I’ve previously blogged about a case study: how the accumulation of poor development practices resulted in the business failure of highly successful Enterprise IT software company.
The technical debt metaphor provides a nice handle for a software development …
Having spent many years on the bleeding edge of test automation and model-based testing, I recently tried an experiment to see to what extent Excel could support a test plan for manual testing of mobile apps.
In a earlier post, I explained some of the thinking behind my new course “How…
This post covers part four of my 2010 talk on testability. White box testability refers to specific programming practices and components that can improve or hinder testability.
Since Dykstra’s 1968 note “Go To Considered Harmful,” practices for producing clean, well-structured, readable, and maintainable software have been the subject of extensive discussion,…
Through Google Circles, I happened to see David Welton’s very interesting reflection on the Tcl programming language (posted in 2010):
http://journal.dedasys.com/2010/03/30/where-tcl-and-tk-went-wrong/
About ten years ago, I chose to develop a commercial automated software testing tool with Tcl and Tk. This post explains that decision and its consequences.
Despite testing tools that tout “visual programming”…
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Bob Binder on 