BBST Foundations 2.0 recap

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So, I hopped to the BBST bandwagon and attended Foundations 2.0 certification program. The four week course was an eye-opening trip I will never forget. And now, few days after finalizing the course, I'd like to reflect on what happened. With the intent of not revealing too much to those who are about to take the course, of course. ;)

Breaking the boundaries of familiar

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It's about time I wrote a blog post. :) Once again there has been a turmoil of everything and this blog has gotten unfortunately low priority among this everything.

But enough about that. I'm boiling with ideas. One of them being the idea behind a tweet I wrote just a moment ago:

This pretty much culminates my values in testing at this moment. But I agree, it requires some explaining. So let's get to that explanation part then.

It's judgment time!

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I came to wonder about oracles in testing. Or more likely got bewildered. You see, I read Cem Kaner's article about this subject and was totally lost when I hit the paragraph "Oracles are Heuristics".

Oracles and heuristics started to blur! I started this post as an attempt to cure my bewilderment via deeper analysis about the article and the thinking behind it, but then shifted to my focus on something much more interesting, namely passing judgment on people.

It's a dangerous path to take, but I took it. Let's see how it went...

NTD2012 roundup - day 2

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Day 2 round up of one of the warmest and friendliest conferences I've ever been in. Nordic Testing Days 2012, baby!

As I stated in my previous post, I missed the beginning of the day 2. Good company and alcoholic beverages are just something that makes me want to press snooze button few more times than usual in the next morning. Plus that breakfast was something else! Kudos, Meriton Grand Hotel!

Mr. Nice Guy in action ;)

Ok, I missed "only" the keynote of Rex Black, but as we seem to believe in different things professionally, I guess it's ok... ;) I had a chance to talk with Rex off-duty and it seems that he's a really nice guy with fashinating stories about his career and personal life. We chatted about testing, economics and even jujutsu. I'm quite bewildered that he travels that much; Over 250 000 miles per year!! What?! On top of everything else, he oozes character. I bet if he chooses to say I'm a girl, I will belive him. I quess you kinda have to have character if you're selling ISTQB... :D

But let's get cracking. Time dig into the presentations/workshops I eventually did participate. Same rules as before; Lightning style, headlines hold the slides, stories are my thoughts about the subject, etc.

Go!

Exploratory Testing Hands-On - Part III

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In my previous post about Exploratory Testing Hands-On I even more deepened the thought process around ET and introduced some ways of testing that go very well with ET. And now it's time to get down to brass tacks, namely introduce the actual way I manage ET with the help of management tools.

It's quite irrelevant which tools to use, but in almost every assignment I've been in HP Quality Center has been the tool of choice for the organization, and this of course has an influence on my output. In my first post of this series I stated that that many consider QC be the worst thing ever happened to a field of software testing. Of course it's extremely bloated, heavy and cumbersome to use, but even it can be used in lightweight fashion that suits ET. Those complaining that QC cannot be used in ET, don't know how to use it. Period.

Ok, time to stand behind my words then.

Exploratory Testing Hands-On - Part II

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In my previous post about Exploratory Testing Hands-On I wrote about thinking and how I set myself into a certain mental state which helps me to do ET. It grew some discussion and even a vision for business. Nice!

And now it's time to go deeper, namely contemplate some of the actual methods and tricks that are often used when doing ET, even by me. Please however note that - as Cem Kaner and James Bach have said - exploratory testing is more a mindset or a way of thinking about testing than a methodology. So session based testing, pair wise testing, Whittaker's touring analogy, etc. aren't ET per se, but just means that are often useful when doing ET.

So let's get at them then!

We Like To Think

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Ok, my original start could have caused unnecessary trouble, in the worst case gotten me to lose my job so I have to keep my openness in check. It was just a whine about how good people are kept from being good testers. With some flavour of course... :)

Even now in this assignment I'm surrounded by very smart people, capable of doing great things, but incapacitated by all the waste. And I hope I could help them as Michael Bolton (not the singer!) helped me in his Rapid Software Testing (RST) course...

And that, ladies and gentlement, is our wobbly donkey bridge to today's topic: heuristics!