Category: Analysis skills
How to write a test strategy
June 20, 2016
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 […]
Free testing book
September 8, 2011
Via Ben Kelly, Rikard Edgren‘s brief but dense ‘Little Black Book On Test Design‘ is worth a read. It’s cheap both in dollars (free) and time (less than 15 minutes if you’re quick).
Something to try if Squirrel SQL stops working on Windows
August 12, 2009
I’ve been using the free Squirrel SQL SQL client under windows for a month or so now. It’s a good tool, though somewhat annoying to get working. Today it stopped working.  The loading splash screen would display, the progress bar would get about halfway through and then Squirrel would exit without any messages. I had no desire […]
The Onion predicts the future once again!
February 4, 2009
The Onion shows off their systems-thinking skills once more. Compare this article on predictive sentence completion with The Onion’s Mac Wheel features at around the one minute mark in the video at http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary. Other clairvoyant articles are here and here. Find your own here.
Claims testing in the wild
October 2, 2008
As yet another poor internet soul is scammed by a man pretending to be a woman in online chat rooms, I’m reminded of the sensibility of my number one internet heuristic. Jared’s first law of online safety is ‘Assume that everyone you are talking to online is a man’. This has held me in good […]
Requirements and specifications: What's the difference and what's it to you?
September 16, 2008
There have been a number of threads I have followed in a few different forums recently where people have discussed requirements, what it means for requirements to be ‘good’, and what it might mean for requirements to be unambiguous. What usually follows is a long-winded back and forth, with no resolution. At the heart of […]
Answering a question…
July 15, 2008
A few weeks ago, Designer commented on Software testing, art and productivity. The question got lost in amongst the comment spam, so I thought I’d give my answer a bit more prominently than usual. The question was: …Many people who want to get a web-developed project don’t even understand the details of work. They just […]
INVESTing in User Stories, revisited
July 14, 2008
Mike Cohn’s “User Stories Applied” discusses using the INVEST mnemonic as a guide to writing better user stories. I was recently asked to dig up a reference for it, and found this presentation here, with the section on the mnemonic on pages 47 and 48. As I read it, I noticed that there’s been a […]
Making user stories work (by writing use cases instead)
January 17, 2008
I’ve had a few common rants on most of the agile projects I have worked on. Developers bogged down in the detail of stories, while the critical goals of the system wound up ignored, or realising at the last minute that all of the stories built would do nothing useful. The ideas I came to […]
What are your users doing (or interview techniques for project analysis)
December 6, 2007
For the first time, I’m helping run planning sessions for an agile project. Planning has been a bit of a bugbear for me on many of my recent projects, so I’m excited to have a chance to try some things out. So far, it seems to be going well. It’s a short project, so I […]