Better Software Magazine Articles
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How Much Is Enough?—Exploring Exploratory Software Testing Exploratory testers design and execute tests in the moment, starting with an open mission and investigating new ideas as they arise. But how do we know when to stop? The first step is to recognize that we can't know when we're done, because any approach to answering the stopping question is necessarily heuristic. |
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What's In a Word? Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?" |
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Mind the Gap The requirements composition table is an effective technique comprising six steps that will help you assess an application's test coverage and identify gaps in your test suite even if you don't have any software requirements specifications. |
Yuri Chernak
February 27, 2008 |
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Breaking Ground on SOA: How to Build and Test Your First Web Service Web services are the foundation of today's service-oriented architecture. This article will teach you how to build a Web service from the ground up as well as how to test it using the three pillars of Web services testing—functional, performance, and interoperability tests. |
Mamoon Yunus
February 27, 2008 |
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Is There a Problem Here? Suppose you were testing an application that you had never seen before with no time to prepare, no specification, no documentation, no reference programs, no prepared test cases, no test plan, and no other person to talk to. How do you know that what you are seeing is a bug? |
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Some Assembly Required Despite the hype, test-driven development is not as easy as child's play. Successful implementation of TDD requires discipline and an understanding of the potential pitfalls. This article examines the "fine print" of TDD and explains how following some guidelines can help you make it a valuable addition to your development toy box. |
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Man and Machine: Combine the Human Mind with Test Automation Tools Instead of viewing software test automation as an effort to replace manual tests think of it as a means to extend the abilities of the tester. Combining the power of the human mind with automation tools helps fuel observation and discovery and provides a different perspective of the software under test. |
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What Counts? In the testing business, we are infected with counting disease–we count test cases, requirements, lines of code, and bugs. But all this counting is an endemic means of deception in the testing business. How do we know what numbers are truly meaningful? |
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A Story About User Stories and Test-Driven Development: The Setup While "testing" is part of its name, many TDD pundits insist TDD is not a testing technique, but rather a technique that helps to focus one's design thinking. Drawing on real events from the authors' combined experience, this story follows a fictional team as it encounters some of the pitfalls of using test-driven development. |
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Behind the Scenes Have you ever found a major defect while testing an unfamiliar system and been unable to explain exactly how you found it? The Framework for Exploratory Testing can help. These four activities help you explain your thought processes and allow you to train others to be better exploratory testers. |
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