Thursday 29 September 2011

Vote Now! TeamSTAR comp for EuroSTAR

The voting for the TeamSTAR competition is now open for today only (Thursday 29th) till 4pm BST.

If you like my cartoons, I'm assuming most of you do since you're reading this, I would appreciate if you could vote for the License to Test video! It should only take 1 or 2 minutes of your time. Just click on the image below:


Do check out the other videos, they're cool!

Many, many, many thanks!



Today's cartoon was first published in STC's The Testing Planet. I must thank Terry Bonds for spotting a typo (thanks Terry!)

Monday 26 September 2011

A James Bond Film

A team of testers and me submitted a video for this year's EuroSTAR TeamStar competition.
Hope you like it!

 















The team members are: Adam Brown (@brownie490), Jenny Lane (@mfboots), Tim Munn (@Nottsmunster) and me (@cartoontester).

The voting for the TeamSTAR competition starts this Thursday, 29th September. I'll post again on the blog on the day with a link to the voting.
It would be great if you could vote for us (if you think the video is any good of course!)

Wednesday 14 September 2011

Pinocchio

Sunday 11 September 2011

Train Them Young

Wednesday 7 September 2011

Bored?



There are a number of ways of getting rid of boredom in testing. One is developing an un-quenching desire to learn more and more and of the application you’re testing. So keep your eyes open and explore.

Thursday 1 September 2011

The Plan



What is more important:
  • Knowing and understanding the application you’re testing
 Or
  • Being able to visualise how you are going to approach the testing
I suspect the answer is it depends.

From my experience, both are required for good testing. Knowing the application, its ins and outs and having the domain knowledge should help test design. Or, from the opposite point of view, not knowing how the application works will mean you won’t know anything about (any) coverage so you’re likely to miss out on bugs.

Being able to visualise your plan of attack means you know what you’re going to test, what areas of the application will be tested and which areas you can ignore (at least for the time being). This provides a structure that you can work in. Not having this can either make the testing daunting or allow the testing to go off on tangents.

This is why I like Session Based Test Management. SBTM provides enough structure and a plan to guide the testing but still allows flexibility for the tester learns more about the application and/or finds bugs, especially if the tester is new to the application and needs to get to grips with it.

I’ve found Rob Lambert and Darren MacMillan often write about visualising their testing or ideas (using mind maps, drawings, call flows). Here are their blogs to find out more: