Testing Excellence

Practices for Maximizing Value from Software Testing

It wasn’t too long ago that quality assurance (QA) teams played the leading (if not the only) role when it came to software testing. These days, however, developers are making an enormous contribution to software quality early in the development process, using automated as well as manual techniques. Throughout the development cycle, there are several [...]

Agile Testing – Not Meant For Dummies

In Agile Development World, testing is thoroughly integrated throughout the lifecycle; testing the software continually throughout its development. Though, Agile development does not have a separate test phase as such, developers are much more highly employed in testing and writing automated repeatable unit tests to validate their code. Apart from looking only to better quality [...]

Bromine: Open Source Test Management for Selenium

This article is about Bromine, an open source functional web test automation tool. We’ll go through the background for Bromine and explain what Bromine is and why you should (or shouldn’t) use it. Finally we’ll introduce two real world scenarios in which Bromine is used. If you have worked with test automation of web sites [...]

Selenium for Test Automation

Selenium is a suite of tools used to automate web application testing across many platforms. It is an open source tool developed in Java Script and browser technologies and hence supports all the major browsers on all the platforms. It was developed by ThoughtWorks Inc. There are 4 components of Selenium: 1) Selenium Core: This is [...]

10 Lessons Learned from Usability Testing

I was introduced to Usability Testing way back in 2003 in the UST Graduate Program in Software. The class was taught by a great professor named Robin Kincaid whose distinguishing credential was that he was literally at Xerox Parc when Steve Jobs came to see the first GUI. Now, Prof. Kincaid wasn’t working on that [...]

Rethinking User Interface Test Automation

Geoff Bache presented on “Making GUI testing productive and Agile” today at Agile Testing Days 2010. Bache started by saying that there is an assumption in the community at the moment that GUI testing is hard to pull off correctly, much harder than data-driven testing, and that many teams have given up on that approach. [...]

The Testing Mindset

If you want your Test-Driven Development (TDD) process to be effective, you need to have a testing mindset. Choosing the right tools helps, but the difference between using the TDD process well and using the TDD process poorly is much larger than any difference between tools. If you’ve heard anything about testing, you’ve been told [...]

What is Static Software Testing?

When people think of software testing they are usually referring to the execution of a program in order to detect the presence of defects. This type of testing, that executes a piece of code which could be a program or a smaller component, is more formally referred to as dynamic testing. Dynamic testing can be [...]

Exploratory vs. planned testing: Which yields better results?

Measuring a software testing effort is a difficult thing. There is a lot of literature about the abuse of test metrics, but surprisingly little about test metrics done well. This is a story from early in my career, when I was first learning how to do software testing, from a time when the testing world [...]

Automate Your Integration Tests

Software testing traditionally has been separated between unit testing – testing classes in isolation – and integration testing – testing across all layers. Whereas unit testing is the domain of developers, integration testing is the domain of analysts. Moreover, most of the time, those tests are not automated and are painfully re-executed by hand each [...]

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