Category: Testing Insights

Testing Insights

Writing tests with BDD

1. The four Ws of BDD

1.1. What ?
BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development) is a concept in which acceptance tests are written as examples that anyone on the team can understand. The process of writing those examples is a collaborative effort of the developers, testers, and the business owner (“los tres amigos”). They decide together if the thing they set out to be built is the right one, before starting implementing it. In doing so, a deliberate effort to develop a shared, ubiquitous language (used and understood by everyone involved in the project) for talking about the system is created.
BDD scenarios are built around…

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Testing Insights

SBTM with iTester and Google Drive

SBTM (Session-Based Test Management) is one of the ways of structuring exploratory testing. There are several tools that help you implement SBTM in your testing work. At Altom, we have developed a couple of our own tools to help us manage our exploratory testing, each suitable for different needs. One of these tools is iTester, which should be useful in case you are running a test session in an environment where using a computer is not practical, while your iPad or iPhone is close at hand. There is also an equivalent for your Google Drive: the SBTM Session Template which allows you to record your sessions straight from your browser, without installing any additional tools.

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Testing Insights

Mobile Game Testing Ideas

After testing a few of mobile games on iOS and Android, I worked with my colleagues from Altom on putting together a mindmap with our ideas on aspects that you should think of when starting to test a game on a mobile phone.

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Testing Insights

Activities in testing – a parallel from qualitative research

I mentioned in the previous article that I would discuss more on the similarity of the phases in a qualitative research process and the phases of the testing activity.
So I continue here the parallel with the book – ‘Reliability and validity in qualitative research’, by Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller – and a more extended discussion on invention, discovery, interpretation and explanation.

“[…] the full qualitative effort depends upon the ordered sequence of invention, discovery, interpretation, and explanation.” (page 60)

When I test a product, I go through a sequence of different activities that focus on different aspects of the testing process.
 
“Invention denotes a phase of preparation, or research design; this phase produces a plan of action.”

In my case, I could see this as the stage at which I decide how to test a software service/product, by identifying and building a test strategy.

In the book three sub-phases associated with invention are presented, in the case of anthropological research: the first directions to the field to be studied, first look over the field and the first taste of it (meaning the first interaction with the culture to be studied). These further dictate the approach of the research.
I associate this with the experience of learning how to approach the testing task at hand. It’s what happens…

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Testing Insights

Test or be square! – Testing through the lens of a 12 year old

A while back, my mom had mentioned that Dara, my oldest niece, who is about to turn 12 soon, had started a computer science class at school and was having some problems with C++ programming that no one in the family could help her with. So, when I was at home visiting them a few months ago, I asked Dara if she wanted me to see if I can help her with that, and she mentioned she had problems understanding arrays.

We went through what the teacher had told them and I did my best to explain them a bit better and give her some examples, which seemed to have helped. However, I suggested that we try to do one of her homework exercises together and asked her if she had any that we could look at. She told me about this website that is used by students all over Romania (http://campion.edu.ro/) which has programming exercises grouped by age/level and by the topic they cover, and that there are a few there that their teacher had suggested they try if they want to practice the use of arrays. So we chose the first one.

Here’s what it said:

Ana and Maria are playing a game with cards with 5 digit numbers written…

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Testing Insights

Personal explorations of qualitative research in testing

One book I read a while ago from the office’s library is about qualitative research. It’s called ‘Reliability and validity in qualitative research’, by Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller.
It sounds fancy and scientific, and it has not been an easy read for me, but I really enjoyed it.
I find it full of great ideas, containing some very consistent examples and discussing ways in which qualitative research can be performed, as well as identifying some really interesting aspects of this approach, with relation to social sciences and anthropology. But I do not intend to review this book.

I’ll try to discuss how I find that some ideas in the book apply to my testing activities. As I read along the pages, I made some thought exercises and tried to identify how my work relates to the ideas presented.

As the title of the book suggests, its framework is given by the reliability problem and the validity problem that arise when performing qualitative research. I instantly related these two problems to…

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Testing Insights

Emacs Python IDE Recipe

My initial goal was to set up Emacs, in the simplest way possible, as a Python development environment that offers basic code browsing and code completion.

This might not be the brightest way to get the job done, and I am open to suggestions, but for now this works just fine for me.

“Ingredients”

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