How do You Measure Test Coverage?

The reason, of course, why people focus on coverage numbers is because they want to know if they are testing enough. Certainly low coverage numbers, say below half, are a sign of trouble. But high numbers don’t necessarily mean much, and lead to ignorance-promoting dashboards. Sufficiency of testing is much more complicated attribute than coverage [...]

Are Testers Really Needed in Agile Teams?

Quite a few Agile teams believe that you don’t need testers to deliver working software. Testers are looked upon as a relic from the waterfall days (requirements, design, code, then pass off to test). On XP teams, everyone is a developer, and developers are responsible and accountable for testing their own code, writing automated unit [...]

Where do Testers Fit in XP?

According to the books, XP includes unit testing (done by the programmers) and acceptance testing (done by the “customers”). Programmers use unit tests merely to verify that the software works as they intended. The acceptance tests are necessary to validate that the software actually works the way the “customer” wants it to.2 Specifically, the “customer” [...]

Blending Automation Approaches

One hundred percent test automation and 100 percent exploratory testing are absolutes. They make for great arguments, but, for those of us stuck in the great middle ground, those positions aren’t very helpful. Matthew Heusser describes a blended approach to software testing, explains how some of his clients have used it over the long term, [...]

Guidelines for Testing E-commerce Websites

So how do you test an e-commerce system? What types of testing do you need to do? Here, I present a checklist of test areas that group together common types of testing normally applied to e-commerce systems.(Some of these tests also apply to other types of systems.) You can cover certain test areas (such as [...]

QA Engineers – Happiest Jobs in America

The happiest job of all isn’t kindergarten teacher or dentist. It’s software quality assurance engineer. Professionals with this job title are typically involved in the entire software development process to ensure the quality of the final product. This can include processes such as requirements gathering and documentation, source code control, code review, change management, configuration [...]

How to Build a Good Automated Test Suite

A good automated test suite runs fast, provides a safety net for refactoring, documents the intent of the code, and alerts the team to regressions. It doesn’t prevent bugs on its own, but if bugs are escaping the team, that’s a sign that there’s a flaw in the team’s development approach–which includes the team’s approach [...]

Effective Agile Testing: Asking the Right Questions

I find that good testers don’t just question the final product. They question the product before work has even started and while it is being developed. And they also challenge the team itself. While this is true of many traditional testers, I have found these lines of questioning to be more prevalent on agile teams [...]

James Whittaker Leaves Google to go Back to Microsoft

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Angry rants about the demise of corporate culture aren’t reserved only for ex-Goldman Sachs employees. Microsoft-turned-Google engineer James Whittaker — now once again a Microsoft employee — fired off a scathing blast Tuesday on a Microsoft blog about why he left Google. “My last three months working for Google was a [...]

How to Capture Screenshots Using WebDriver in Java and C#

Selenium 2 (or WebDriver) has come up with some great new functionality that makes website testing much easier. This is because of the webdriver architecture allows interaction outside of javascript sandbox. That means if you have a quirky browser implemnentation of javascript and you had to shoe horn your scripts, you don’t have to do [...]

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