The Olden Days by Jon M Quigley I recently had a phone call with a person I met on LinkedIn. Actually, I have been having calls with them over the weeks, to talk about product development, especially the way it was in the olden days. Over the course of few discussions we began chatting about […]
By Jon M. Quigley I saw a LinkedIn post yesterday about the scope of testing during times of compressed schedule. The position was to test what is new in the software, and of that new, what is the most important, perhaps meaning what if it goes wrong, would be the worst for the client or […]
I have long had an affinity for nature, having camped with my family when I was a child. For years, I have been visiting Gatlinburg Tennessee. For someone who has spent much of his time in North Carolina, it is sad that I found this place accidentally when my wife won a three-day trip. Since […]
State diagrams can also help us develop the requirements and consider software and hardware requirements that may not be so easily evoked from the customer. The state diagram describes the behavior or the software / system, specifically the number of states in which the product may be. There will be transitions between states defined by […]
Software Structure Defined Non-functional requirements such as software extensibility can be very difficult to document as we likely do not know all of the future features or growth we can anticipate for the product as it matures. Poorly managed, the code may descend into what is sometimes referred to as spaghetti code. Instead of the […]
Business Imperative There was a discussion going on LinkedIn and Twitter about technical debt, and management decisions. Sometimes business imperative trumps technical debt, but you must acknowledge the technical debt, and compare the business positives against the technical debt negatives. Technical Debt We should probably start by giving a definition of technical debt. Technical debt […]
With fifth dimension testing, we use techniques more commonly employed by the “bad guys.” For example, we may execute techniques such as: Fuzzing Response modification using genetic algorithms Input breakdown Overflows Underflows This approach allows for evolution of our test collection. We can automate a significant number of these tests if we have a comprehensive, […]
We have discussed compliance testing earlier. This is known as testing to requirement. These requirements can be taken directly from a customer specification (when we have one) or derived internally from a requirements review or even both. Compliance testing is the primary method we use to ensure that we are meeting all specifications and […]
Requirements management and configuration management are required for anything that even closely resembles effective testing. Experience suggests failing in these two areas unnecessarily complicates the product verification activities, and we will show some of those traumas in the next few posts. An iterative and incremental product development process calls for reviews throughout the development process. […]
We have recently had a discussion on what it takes to quality assure software. The discussion focused on FMEA and the role it plays in quality assurance. The discussion began to sound as if the FMEA was the panacea for poor quality. There is no silver bullet. To be sure the FMEA (which is essentially […]