Best practices are everywhere and they are very trendy. Everyone should have a list of best practices for their domain on their blog just for the google traffic. Here are my best practices for good testing:
- Do not interrupt busy testers more than once a day.
- Be willing and able to test anything even if it’s not finished and get meaningful results – if you can’t you need to focus on best practice #3.
- Learn a new testing skill every day.
- Understand and use multiple oracles to find bugs.
- Understand and isolate bugs before reporting them.
- Always understand the project context and how it affects the determination that something is a “bug” vs. being an unfinished feature.
- Solve your own problems as much as possible.
- Know and acknowledge your limitations – don’t pretend you can do security testing if all you know is a simple XSS attack that you learned on my blog.
- Advocate for bug fixes without turning the rest of the team against you.
- Tell managers who break best practice #1 to leave you the hell alone.
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7 responses so far ↓
1 Lee Copeland // Sep 30, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Like all (alleged) best practices, I can think of a context in which each of these is a bad idea.
2 davidray // Sep 30, 2009 at 8:12 pm
That's so awesome. I love you true-to-the-faith context guys. I'm not being facetious – I really do.
I should have had something in the list about context trumping everything because I totally agree with you, but I didn't really intend anyone to take me seriously. I think everything on the list is a good tip under the right circumstances, but I was really just trying to poke fun at best practices by making ten of them up in less than two minutes.
3 Dave Whalen // Sep 30, 2009 at 11:04 pm
OK….maybe its just me but….
Is marketing the Context-Driven School as a "best practice" a violation of the Context-Driven School?
4 Aaron Hodder // Dec 9, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Simply rename it to “10 good practices for effective testing” and you’re covered
Dave, can you show me where the Context-Driven School has ever been marketed as a “best practice”?
5 Justin Hunter // Dec 9, 2010 at 3:30 pm
David,
I was expecting you to pull a context-driven nugget out of your hat at the last minute and have # 10 read: “Don’t put too much blind faith in any guideline you see described as a ‘best practice’ because best practices don’t actually exist in testing; testing is, after all, a context-driven endeavor. Having said that, keep points 1-9 in mind as helpful tips that apply in most circumstances.”
Nice list.
- Justin
6 Tweets that mention Ten Best Practices for Effective Testing -- Topsy.com // Dec 9, 2010 at 4:02 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jay Philips, WordsFromAPurpleMind. WordsFromAPurpleMind said: #QATips: Ten Best Practices for Effective #Testing http://wfapm.com/hQgc7g #softwaretesting [...]
7 David Christiansen // Dec 9, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Haha. Ten good practices wouldn’t bring me the google traffic!
I guess the sarcasm about best practices didn’t come through in the post…
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