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 […]

Register for the free introduction to product (hardware and software) testing in a course online that covers the topics: Stakeholders / Sponsors Project Scope Configuration Management Static Testing Techniques (inspections) Dynamic techniques Approaches to testing Regression , Re-test and Human Interactions Evaluation Putting it together with TIEMPO Test Management This course includes the creation of […]

We have created an online introduction to product testing course. The course is free, and highly interactive. It consists of ten modules on topics listed below with some of the attributes per module.       1.)  Stakeholders and Sponsors   2.) Scope and Requirements   3.) Configuration Management and Testing   4.)  Static Testing Techniques   5.)  Dynamic Testing […]

Testing and Repeat-ability  Repeat-ability of testing results is important to establishing cause and corrective actions. If it is not possible to repeat the sequence of events leading to a failure, it is not possible to replicate and therefore difficult solve the cause of the fault or failure.  The steps that evoked the problem are necessary […]

Not a Verification Problem I recently had a flash of a project from the past. The project had a fixed delivery date.  The project was to deliver a system through iterative and incremental deliveries. Sounds pretty good right? An iterative and incremental delivery of sub systems and components to the verification group in a way […]

Below is an excerpt of our book Testing of Complex and Embedded Systems Pries, K., & Quigley, J. (2011). Chapter 4. In Testing Complex and Embedded Systems (pp. 33-35). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.   Basic Principle of Testing The verification and test group is there to provide some critical and unbiased review of the […]

As we execute the test cases, we will likely find failures. These failures or faults will be reported into a reporting system that will allow us to track the failure resolution. We can also use that here in our progress tracking sheet.

Agile in Conventional Project Line Management The following is a story from a couple of years back.  The story is about lengthy set of verification activities (multiple iterations) in a large conventionally run project.  As many a test engineer will relate, testing is always cramped for time. Meaning, the time we want the answers is much […]

We have referred to Stochastic Testing in an earlier blog post as an exploratory technique.  We provide a Google definition of exploration below: Exploration – the action of traveling in or through an unfamiliar area in order to learn about it. Stochastic testing is not compliance testing (requirements) even though we are exercising the product […]