Author: kristinjackvony

In last week’s post, I discussed the various things we should remember to test before we consider our testing “done”.  This prompted a question from a reader: “How can I test all these things when there is very limited time for testing?”  In today’s agile world, we often don’t have as much time as we […]

We’ve all been in this situation: we’ve tested something, we think it’s working great, and after it goes to Production a customer finds something obvious that we missed.  We can’t find all the bugs 100% of the time, but we can increase the number of bugs we find with this one simple question: “What haven’t […]

Has this ever happened to you?  You arrive at work in the morning to find that many of your nightly automated tests have failed.  Upon investigation, you discover that your test user has been edited or deleted.  Your automation didn’t find a bug, and your test isn’t flaky; it simply didn’t work because the data […]

The term “smoke test” is usually used to describe a suite of basic tests that verify that all the major features of an application are working.  Some use the smoke test to determine whether a build is stable and ready for further testing.  I usually use a smoke test as the final check in a […]

Last week, we talked about all the things you should check before you log a bug, in order to make sure that what you are seeing is really a bug.  Once you have run through all your checks and you are sure you have a bug, it’s time to log it.  But just throwing a […]

Have you heard the ancient fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”?  In the tale, a shepherd boy repeatedly tricks the people of his village by crying out that a wolf is about to eat his sheep.  The villagers run to his aid, only to find that it was a prank.  One day, the boy really […]

Having been in the software testing business for a few years now, I’ve become accustomed to various types of testing: Acceptance Testing, Regression Testing, Exploratory Testing, Smoke Testing, etc.  But in the last few weeks, I’ve been introduced to a type of testing I hadn’t thought of before: Pretesting. On our team, we are working […]

Two weeks ago, I introduced a hypothetical software feature called the Superball Sorter, which would sort out different colors and sizes of Superballs among four children.  I discussed how to create a test plan for the feature, and then last week I followed up with a post about how to organize a test plan using […]

In last week’s post, we took a look at a hypothetical software feature which would sort out Superballs among four children according to a set of rules.  I came up with forty-five different test cases from simple to complicated that would test various combinations of the rules.  But a blog post is not a very […]

Being a software tester means much more than just running through Acceptance Criteria on a story.  We need to think critically about every new feature and come up with as many ways as we can to test it.  When there are many permutations possible in a feature, we need to balance being thorough with testing […]