This blog posting will serve as a catch-all for the web-pages I left open on my tabs during the last few weeks. In case you’re interested in what I did since the beginning of August, it might be worth a read for you.
Back in July Mike Bria posted an article on Test objects, not methods. His lesson boils pretty much down to one single quote that I need to remind myself of:
Keep yourself focused on writing tests for the desired behavior of your objects, rather than for the methods they contain.
Over the past weekend Michael Bolton came up with a final definition on checking vs. testing. Lately I argued whether or not we need a new name for testing. Michael Bolton was able to explain to me in this post that we do not need a new name, but a proper definition. This definition in combination with Perfect Software gives you pretty well insights into what to expect from testing and what to expect from checking. Adam Goucher summarized a talk from Chris McMahon at the Agile 2009 conference with the following insight:
The only reason to automate is to give expert testers time to manually test.
Ivan Sanchez stated that there is another area where a term got lately abused with vague definitions. The term is “done” and he calls for stopping redefining and redefining it. Basically my experience shows that the same is pretty much true to a lot of words in our business. Lean, Test, Done, Agile, …. maybe you have more of these for the comments.
On my way home today I thought over a job profile I read over the past month. Basically when transporting it to my company I would include “You know the difference between testing and checking” in the skill list.
Finally Matt Heusser put up another test challenge. What I loved about it was the fact that I could more or less directly relate the lesson to my daily work. So it’s nothing really artificial if you build the bridge between the abstract challenge and your real-world project. Oh, and of course, for a geek like me it was fun. Wonder, if I could do the challenge in the real-world, once. I love lightsabres. And as a black-belt member of the Miagi-Do school I had to take that challenge, of course. Feel free to exchange some thoughts on the challenge with me if you have taken it.
