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I. M. Testy

Treatises on the practice of software testing is now located at http://testingmentor.com/imtesty

GUI Automation and ROI

It seems that many test automation efforts around the industry tend to focus on GUI automation, or...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/27/2008

Customer expectations

Last October after presenting a keynote at the Conquest software testing conference I was invited to...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/19/2008

Do testers do code reviews?

This weekend on the flight from Seattle to Ireland I finally got to catch up on some reading. One of...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/11/2008

Vista Rant #3 - And yet another boundary issue in Explorer's listview?

This morning I installed Vista SP1 onto my laptop. I was pretty excited about this release of Vista...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 02/27/2008

Contextual blindness: or How to take things completely out of context

Many testers are familiar with the concept of inattentional blindness (or at least should be in my...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 02/13/2008

Microsoft ranked in top 10 training organizations

I have been tardy in my writing...too many irons in the fire these days. This week I have been...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 02/08/2008

Do testers need programming skills?

The debate over whether testers need to at least understand programming concepts is still raging...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 01/28/2008

Thoughts on becoming a professional tester

"If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 01/21/2008

UTF What?

Years ago life was pretty simple with regard to data input. Most computer programs were limited to...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 01/13/2008

Automation Foibles Unveiled: Coding Guidelines Part 1 - Basic Layout

It has been awhile since I have written about test automation, so I thought I would start the new...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 01/05/2008

How Professional Testers Think: Why Microsoft primarily hires testers with a Computer Science, Math or Engineering background?

The easiest thing to criticize is that which one does not fully comprehend. There has been a lot of...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 12/27/2007

Blindly buying into rumor and innuendo: or how to lose stock in your credibility

It never ceases to amaze me that every time we see a calamity involving software the immediate...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 12/23/2007

Putting the Context back in Context-driven testing

Tonight I was having dinner at the superb Italian restaurant L'Olivo along the canal in Nyhaven,...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 12/16/2007

Exploratory testing vs. Scripted testing; Is it really only either or?

I just left Stockholm after spending a week there. That was my second visit to Stockholm and it is...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 12/09/2007

Equivalence Class Partitioning Part 3 - The tests

In the last post we decomposed the set of characters in the ANSI character set into valid and...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 11/29/2007

Equivalence class partitioning - Part 2: Character/String data decomposition

Again, I am remiss in my postings...too many irons in the fire these days. Two weeks ago, I posted a...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 11/15/2007

Equivalence class partitioning - Part 1

Wow...where does the time go? I was remiss last week in posting, and it has been a month since I...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 10/31/2007

Exploratory Testing versus Ad Hoc Testing

A few weeks ago a read an interesting post on SQA Forums about exploratory testing. It was...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 10/18/2007

Boundary testing - hidden loops and the Deja Vu Heuristic

I previously discussed various types of defects exposed via application of the boundary value...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 10/08/2007

Equivalence class partitioning

I have been teaching formal testing techniques for several years at Microsoft and University of...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 09/30/2007

Babel - A 'new' random Unicode string generator test tool

For some time I have wanted to add surrogate pair character support to a tool I developed called...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 09/20/2007

Boundary testing and wrapping; or 1,073,741,824 * 1,073,741,824 = 0

I have never been really good at math. Sure I understand basic formulas, but I rely on a calculator...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 09/14/2007

Casting types and boundary testing

The traditional concept of boundary testing was established as a systematic procedure to more...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 09/05/2007

Why we automate

I never really understood why so many people external to Microsoft seem to be against the Microsoft...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 08/30/2007

Vista Rant #2 - Incredible disappearing files

If you like obscure bugs, then I think you'll love this little gem! USB flash drives are wonderful...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 08/20/2007

The code coverage metric is inversely proportional to the critical information it provides.

One of the best aspects of my current role is the opportunity to interact with so many talented,...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 08/13/2007

Emoting software: more thoughts on simulating emotions...

I am fascinated with the advances computing, and have always approached computing from the...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 08/01/2007

How long will it take?

When getting close to shipping a product and the team discovers a critical defect that must be fixed...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 07/25/2007

Quality is not Value!

I previously blogged about quality and value, but after giving it more thought I determined that...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 07/16/2007

Tools don't replace humans; humans who don't learn to use tools obsolete themselves.

I have been taking some time these past few weeks to enjoy the weather here in Seattle relaxing...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 07/12/2007

What climbing Mount Fuji taught me about software testing

When I lived in Japan one of the many memorable experiences was ascending Mount Fuji. I started in...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 06/26/2007

Test Automation Foibles: Hard coded paths

Anyone who has listened to me talk about automated test design knows that I loathe hard-coded...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 06/20/2007

Emotional Test Automation

In April I hosted a session at the Software Testing and Performance conference entitled Why Test...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 06/08/2007

Schools of Testing Revisited

Rahul Verma invited me to read several very well-compilled posts discussing various views on the...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 06/01/2007

Random test data generation

I am not a big fan of static test data, so this month's issue of Software Testing and Performance...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 05/30/2007

Tester's Guide to Gaining 'System' Knowledge

In retrospect, my father had the incredible foresight to introduce me to electronics at a young age....

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 05/10/2007

Software testing in a flat world

I have been in Europe for the past 2 weeks presenting at conferences in Germany and visiting our...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 05/03/2007

Influencing one at a time...

I had a professor who once told me her greatest reward in life would be to influence just one of her...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 04/28/2007

Vista Rant #1 - Spell checking on Windows Mail "This language is no longer available!"

Well, at first I was skeptical about Windows Vista because I didn't really see any significant...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 04/04/2007

Testing is NOT responsible for quality!

The value of testing is important and critical to the success of many projects. However, testing is...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 04/04/2007

The Tao of Testing

Ancient Chinese history is fascinating, and there is incredible insight and wisdom in ancient texts...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/19/2007

5 Questions with Michael Hunter

Michael Hunter is a well know tester both inside and outside of Microsoft. Michael writes a testing...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/13/2007

Sex, Death and Fly-fishing and other books for software testers

It is a gray rainy day in Seattle and still rather cold outside; one of those lazy sort of days when...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/10/2007

More on testing Mp3 files and the boundary testing debate

Over the past 3 days I have learned more about Mp3 file encoding and decoding than I have since the...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/07/2007

More on boundary testing and Mp3 encodings

My previous post refuting a conjecture by Pradeep Soundarajan suggesting there are no boundary...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/06/2007

A little bit about me...

Well, I guess I hit a nerve that caused James Bach to put me square in his crosshairs. James'...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/04/2007

The difference between professional testing and arbitrary guessing or wild speculation

My friend and teammate Alan knows how passionate I get about certain things on occasion, so he threw...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 03/03/2007

Rambling...

I am feeling rather facetious tonight, so if you don't want to bear with pointless diatribe, then...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 02/27/2007

A tester's perspective on quality vs value.

Quality is a mysterious thing. It seems difficult to articulate definatively, but it is relatively...

Author: I.M.Testy Date: 02/18/2007

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