An Ingredients List for Testing - Part Five
Friday, October 01, 2010
By James Whittaker
One of the problems with testing is that testers don’t possess a common vocabulary for the techniques they apply to actually perform testing. Some testers talk about partitioning the input domain and others gravitate toward boundary values but in general there are no catalogues of testing techniques that would allow a conversation such as: run the Landmark Tour on the bookmark sync feature of Chrome. Everyone understands that Chrome is a web browser and that it allows users to sync bookmarks, but how does one test it with a Landmark Tour?
“Tours” are the metaphor we use at Google to name and describe testing techniques. Every tour encapsulates past testing knowledge, i.e., stuff that worked for other testers on other projects, and can be reused and improved upon. Over time testers get a feel for which tours apply to what type of functionality. It’s a way to identify and store tribal knowledge of the overall team. That's the fifth ingredient: test guidance.
One of the problems with testing is that testers don’t possess a common vocabulary for the techniques they apply to actually perform testing. Some testers talk about partitioning the input domain and others gravitate toward boundary values but in general there are no catalogues of testing techniques that would allow a conversation such as: run the Landmark Tour on the bookmark sync feature of Chrome. Everyone understands that Chrome is a web browser and that it allows users to sync bookmarks, but how does one test it with a Landmark Tour?
“Tours” are the metaphor we use at Google to name and describe testing techniques. Every tour encapsulates past testing knowledge, i.e., stuff that worked for other testers on other projects, and can be reused and improved upon. Over time testers get a feel for which tours apply to what type of functionality. It’s a way to identify and store tribal knowledge of the overall team. That's the fifth ingredient: test guidance.
What about certifications (for example, ISTQB)? One of the most important reasons why certifications exist (if not the only one) is to provide a common "language".
ReplyDeleteI think there are many methods and techniques that are not clearly defined the terms in testing area. The lack of these terms, which makes it difficult to communicate between testers. For example, we analyze defect trend, and change the order and the item of test. If we have common term that mean this way of thinking, it's really useful.
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