Category: Blog

One question that comes up again and again in Testing world today is about role of testing in the domain of applications in Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. To be precise, many in testing community are curious and some-what confused about what they need to do differently (if at all) and what skills they need…

Over last two week end – The Test Tribe (popular testing community) hosted two sessions on facebook – one from T Ashok on Smart QA and other from James Bach on “Testing Heuristics“. Both sessions were well received and interestingly I could see some connection between ideas that were part of these two sessions. Industrialisation…

One of the fashion statement associated with testing these days is “testers should focus on preventing bugs rather than finding them”. This is a very tricky idea and is full of traps for testers. Recently a post came up in software testing yahoo group that somehow got into this topic of preventing bugs. Coming from…

“Yet the danger if reification is all too real. We fall in love with our models, yet we need to be reminded that they are just models of the real world.” Lynn Chiu A good friend of mine Ray Arell in a tweet asks “why not have a CVO – Chief Value Officer”. The word…

[off topic] In my opinion, about 70-80% of ailments or diseases treated by doctors using so called evidence based medicines are in the category of “managed diseases” requiring the patient to take medicines life long in additions regular tests and medical consultancy. A very small portions of diseases today are actually curable. This is in…

Often, I get mails asking testers and budding testers asking questions and seeking my answers. Some of them are questions to something I wrote on my blog. Most of the questions are in the form “what is xxx” or “how to do yyy”.  Here is my advice/suggestion on how one should approach getting answers to…

I am not talking about “test automation” here. There is media hype sweeping across these days on jobs being lost, people being fired, retrained on “cutting edge” technologies, re-assigned to new technologies etc . This quora question is an example of people’s interest in this. Let me do a deep dive into this topic Its…

James Bach wrote this great article on how not to think about Test automation way back in 1999. Anyone starting into automation and those wanting to learn more about automation – must read this article. First of all automation is about testing. If you think narrowly about testing – your automation will be narrow.  Even…

In the recent times – I came across two instances where names/phrases we use in our daily life as software people – programmers and testers make a huge impact on what we do. The names we use to indicate things create objects/actions larger than the life. Unit testing is something that only developers do A…

Ten years since I posted my first post – it has been a long journey. Some years very active with many posts and some very lean – like this year. I want to avoid creating a weird record of having exactly one in 1st and 10th year. This is not so happy state in being.…