Comments on: What is the purpose of software testing?

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:41:49 +0000

Just a note on Columbus: he was not trying to prove that the earth was round, he was trying to prove that he could reach India faster by sailing West from Europe than the overland route through the Middle East.
Other than that, very interesting article!

By: mukalazi henry

mukalazi henry — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:05:03 +0000

To minimize on the risk of not working up to an acceptance level

By: David Christiansen

David Christiansen — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 14:22:38 +0000

Bob, I think you’re right that there may be a place for school #2 in many areas. The fact that it’s not useful to me doesn’t mean it’s completely useless.

That said, I have a hard time justifying the cost of hordes of unskilled test script monkeys. There has got to a better way to convince your clients that you’ve done what they asked you to do.

But maybe I’m just fed up with the extreme implementation of this, having personally seen development projects with 30+ testers pounding scripts for months when there were only ever about 10 developers.

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:37:12 +0000

RE: school #2

This one is vital for an independent developer trying to get paid for a piece of code. I’ve seen people go around in nasty circles because of this.

– it has its place, just not so useful in a corp. setting

By: David Christiansen

David Christiansen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:29:14 +0000

I think the appeal of waterfall comes from two sources – widespread belief that the cost change curve is a law of nature (late changes cost a bazillion times more than early changes) and the happy, comfortable feeling that accompanies a comprehensive upfront plan (even if it is completely unrealistic).

I host my own blog – I don’t know what it’s like to have WordPress host it for you. I’m not sure how you install plugins and themes when WP hosts it for you. Maybe they let you, but I’m not sure. I have always preferred to control my own environment, plus I like to play around with other technologies like Joomla, Moodle, etc, in my domain.

By: Dennis Gorelik

Dennis Gorelik — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:32:30 +0000

1) All other things being equal, businesses prefer to pay less and get better results.
Apparently, Waterfall provides to the businesses (or to corporate bureaucracy) something valuable, something that iterative development don’t usually provide.
May be it’s because Waterfall teams give some promises, that client’s bureaucrat can use to pass the blame?

2) I’ll test it for you.
I’m considering switching to WordPress too (currently I use Blogger).
What do you think: does it make sense to host the blog on your own web site, or it’s better to host it on WordPress?
That would keep your blog always up-to-date with the most recent WordPress features, right?

By: TDD: It’s A People Problem | Programmer’s Paradox

TDD: It’s A People Problem | Programmer’s Paradox — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 02:53:53 +0000

[...] I came across this eye opening post on testing. I’d never thought about there being a fundamental difference in philosophies on testing [...]

By: David Christiansen

David Christiansen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:48:21 +0000

Hi Dennis,
To question #1, I think one of the reasons why the specification compliance assurance crowd gets more money is because they need more money – it takes a lot of time to write and execute all those scripts. Plus, projects that take this approach are usually serial development (aka waterfall) projects that use the test phase as contingency. When they finally get to test (if they ever get there – waterfall has a horrible success rate) they are usually behind schedule, so the PM’s and business sponsors try to crash schedule by throwing bodies at the testing effort.

For #2 – I’ll do my best. When I get a fix installed, will you test it for me? I need to do an overall WordPress upgrade anyway, so it might be a few days.

By: IT’s About Uptime - The StackSafe Blog » Change Management by the Numbers

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:16:27 +0000

[...] bind because they task their QA groups to build, test, and implement changes. And why not expect QA to handle this requirement? QA groups have unit test labs containing mature tools, they enjoy the rigor of test plans, and [...]

By: Dennis Gorelik

Dennis Gorelik — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:25:01 +0000

1) The size of a group depends on how much money (budget) is available for this group.
What do you think is the reason that “Specification Compliance Assurance” group gets bigger budget?

2) When you’re fixing CAPTCHA — please also add “email me follow-up comments” checkbox (or simply send follow-up comments if email was provided).
Without email notification I don’t know when my comment/question is addressed).