Author: kristinjackvony

This month I’m continuing my look at logical fallacies with the Straw Man Fallacy. The Straw Man Fallacy occurs when someone takes another person’s position and exaggerates it in an extreme way, or makes a counter-assertion that is not relevant to the first person’s position. This is easier to explain with examples, so let’s take […]

As you can no doubt guess from the title, this is the third post on my series about logical fallacies. (You can find the first two posts here and here.) Logical fallacies are important for testers to learn about because it can help keep them from making mistakes in judgment that will impact their testing […]

In last month’s post, I introduced a new theme for my blog posts in 2023! Each month, I’ll be examining a different type of logical fallacy, and how the fallacy relates to software testing. This month we’ll be learning about the Sunk-Cost Fallacy. The Sunk-Cost Fallacy happens when someone has made a decision that turns […]

Lately I’ve been thinking about thinking; specifically, critical thinking skills and how important they are for everyone, especially testers. When testers can’t think critically, they aren’t able to diagnose software problems quickly or find good solutions to testing challenges. In light of this, I’ve decided to focus on critical thinking in my blog posts this […]

I’ve posted in the past about how to make sure that you really have a bug before you log it; how to investigate a bug; and how to log the bug once you have finished investigating it. But I’ve never posted about how to get your bug fixed. Even if you log a fabulously detailed […]

Anyone who does any type of software testing understands that having test users is a necessary part of the process. Generally you can’t log into the production version of an application as an actual user because of security concerns, and test environments don’t have real users. In this post, I’ll talk about why test users […]

Software development teams face all kinds of challenges. They need to learn new technologies while keeping legacy products running. They need to balance addressing tech debt with adding new features quickly. With all of these challenges, why should anyone care what groups, teams, products, or tests are named? Here are five reasons why: Reason One: […]

I didn’t understand the importance of Product Owners until I created my own web app. It was such a simple app (you can see it at https://thinking-tester-contact-list.herokuapp.com), but I had to figure out how to get from one page to another, and how to make sure a user never gets stuck at a dead end. […]

As software testers, we have a lot of different things to think about.  We need to test new features and existing features.  We need to make sure different features work correctly together.  We need to run manual tests and make sure that our test automation is running correctly.  And we need to test on different […]

People often ask me, “What’s the ideal tester-developer ratio?” My answer is always, “It depends.” There are a number of factors that determine what a good tester-developer ratio should be. Things to consider are: whether you are working on cutting-edge technology or a legacy product, the talent and experience of your team members, and what […]