Enterprise test strategies for traditional organisations

Continuing my posts on strategy, here’s a new example outline of how I’ve recently approached test strategy for larger, traditional organisations, transititioning to DevOps. It contains a lot of items that would be aspirational for some places, but also creates a view of something quite achievable that fits with typical change management systems you’ll find […]

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On UI test automation

In a recent Twitter interaction, I was pushing Alan Page to clarify a key poing on his anti-UI-automation thread. I didn’t get it, and there have been a few more responses such that I wanted to make my current thinking and position clear. I tweeted this as well, but here’s the thread for those not […]

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How to write a test strategy

I’ve documented my overall approach to rapid, lightweight test strategy before but thought it might be helpful to post an example.  If you haven’t read the original post above, see that first. This is the a sanitised version of the first I ever did, and while there are some concessions to enterprise concerns, it mostly […]

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Tools for thinking about context – Agile sliders reimagined

Philosophically, I’m aligned to the context-driven testing view of the world. Largely, this is influenced by a very early awareness of contextual factors to success in my first job, and the wild difference between games testing and corporate testing roles that I had. Since 2003, the work of the context-driven school founders has been a […]

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Why record-playback (almost) never works and why almost nobody is using it anyway

Alister Scott once again calls out a number of spot-on technical points regarding the use of automation tools. In this case, he discusses record/playback automation tools. Technical reasons aside, we also need to look at the non-technical reasons. I’ve only once encountered someone trying to rely on the record-playback feature of an automation tool (my […]

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Testing does not prevent defects

There seems to be a bunch of discussion regarding whether testers prevent defects or not. The main source of confusion that I see is confusing ‘testers’ with ‘testing’. Clearing this up seems pretty simple. Testing does not prevent defects. Testers may. I do. But I don’t call that part of my work ‘testing’, even if […]

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This blog post regarding test code being harder than application code was passed around the office, and I thought I would preserve my response here. You’ll need to read it first for this to make much sense. I think there’s a reasonable point that testing is frequently trivialised, but I don’t think saying that the […]

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More haiku updates

I’ve added some new ones, need to take one out. At some point, there should probably be a bunch of Scaled Agile haiku. See the agile haiku page.

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