We live in a time where it is easy to measure things. Websites measure visits from users all over the world; YouTube videos measure views and likes; mobile apps measure crash statistics. So it makes sense that software managers would want to measure quality activities. Unfortunately, we don’t always have clear language to describe what […]
Author: kristinjackvony
Five Quality Changes to Make When Your Company Grows
Working for a startup is fun, because a small group of people get to make all the decisions. You know the whole team well, and decisions can be made with a few simple conversations. As a company grows, you don’t know all your colleagues as well, but it’s still fairly easy to think of them […]
Testathon
Recently, I was talking with some technology leaders at my company about how we needed to encourage testers to do more exploratory testing. We were getting ready to hold our second annual Hackathon, and one of our group suggested “Why not have a competition for testing as well?” And thus, Testathon was born! To prepare […]
What Does a Bug Count Mean?
As software companies grow, they often find it necessary to start measuring things. When a company has just a couple of dozen people, it’s pretty easy to see whether a software tester is performing well, or whether they are struggling. But when a company grows to several hundred or several thousand people, it becomes more […]
SOLID Principles for Testers: The Dependency Inversion Principle
It’s time for the last SOLID principle! The Dependency Inversion Principle has two parts, and we’ll take a look at them one at a time. First, the principle states that “High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules, but should instead depend on abstractions.” In order to understand this, we first need to know the […]
SOLID Principles for Testers: The Interface Segregation Principle
We’re over halfway done learning about the SOLID principles! Today it’s time to learn about the “I”: the Interface Segregation Principle. In order to understand this principle, we first need to understand what an interface is. An interface is a definition of a set of methods that can implemented in a class. Each class that […]
SOLID Principles for Testers: The Liskov Substitution Principle
It’s time to learn about the “L” in SOLID! The Liskov Substitution Principle is named for Barbara Liskov, a computer scientist who introduced the concept in 1987. The principle states that you should be able to replace objects in a superclass with objects of a subclass with no alterations in the program. In order to […]
SOLID Principles for Testers: The Open-Closed Principle
This month we are continuing our investigation of SOLID principles with the “O” value: the Open-Closed principle. This principle states the following: a class should be open for extension, but closed for modification. What does this mean? It means that once a class is used by other code, you shouldn’t change the class. If you […]
SOLID Principles for Testers: The Single Responsibility Principle
Those who have been reading my blog for several years have probably figured out that when I want to learn something, I challenge myself to write a blog post about it. In 2020, I read one book on software testing each month and wrote a book review. In 2023, I learned about one Logical Fallacy […]
Why I Hate Test Case Management Systems (and Why I’m Using One Anyway)
One of the first things I learned as a new software tester was how much I hated test case management systems. If you aren’t familiar with test case management systems, they are tools that allow testers to keep a collection of manual tests for reuse. In the days before test automation was popular, they were […]