Tag Archives: context-driven testing

Agile Testing, Context-driven Testing, Testing

On auditing, standards, and ISO 29119

Leave a comment

Disclaimer:
Since I am publishing this on my personal blog, this is my personal view, the view of Markus Gärtner as an individual.

I think the first time I came across ISO 29119 discussion was during the Agile Testing Days 2010, and probably also during Stuart Reid’s keynote at EuroSTAR 2010. Remembering back that particular keynote, I think he was visibly nervous during his whole talk, eventually delivering nothing worth of a keynote. Yeah, I am still disappointed by that keynote four years later.

Recently ISO 29119 started to be heavily debated in one of the communities I am involved in. Since I think that others have expressed their thoughts on the matter more eloquently and deeper than I going to do, make sure to look further than my blog for a complete picture of the whole discussion. I am going to share my current state of thoughts here.

Continue reading On auditing, standards, and ISO 29119 →
Context-driven Testing

Two problems with context-driven testing

13 Comments

Over the course of the Let’s Test conference in Runö, Sweden, I noticed a problem with context-driven testing. In the past one or two months this turned into two problems I see with context-driven testing. I finally decided to put them out there for further discussion. I hope a lot of you don’t agree with me – and I hope a lot of you folks speak up.

Continue reading Two problems with context-driven testing →
Context-driven Testing

Lessons Learned from Context-driven testing

8 Comments

There has been some fluff and rumor around context-driven testing yesterday. Some folks even talked about the death of context-driven testing. Most of it was issued by the about page from Cem Kaner. If you haven’t read it yet, go ahead, read it now, I will wait here.

Back? Alright. Now, I would like to take a pick on what context-driven testing means to me, and why I think the whole schools concept can help us shape something. These are the rough ideas I had around a proposal for CAST 2012 which was not accepted. It is based on the combination of the schools concept with complexity thinking and the CDE-model. Oh, you don’t know that one? I will introduce it.

Here is the abstract that I submitted:

Title: Significant Differences and Transforming Exchanges
In this workshops participants will apply three different concepts from complexity thinking to the schools of software testing model. The three different concepts – containers, differences, and transformational exchanges – will be explained in the workshop. We will directly apply complexity thinking to the schools of testing, and discuss where we see the schools help to shape different containers, what the significant differences between the schools are, and how transformational exchanges between the different schools could happen, and maybe where they will even fail.

Armed with these tools, we will discuss how to evolve our craft of software testing, eventually extending the the concept of the different schools of thought, and find platforms for transforming software testing for the 21st century.

Continue reading Lessons Learned from Context-driven testing →
Agile Testing, Context-driven Testing, Kanban, Leadership, Methodologies, Scrum, Software Craft, Testing

Lessons from complexity thinking

8 Comments

While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.

Continue reading Lessons from complexity thinking →
Context-driven Testing, Testing

CAST 2011: A report on the Testing Competition

5 Comments

Last week at CAST 2011 we were challenged by James Bach on a testing competition. While I was initially a bit reluctant to join the Miagi-Do team, the opportunity to test with all these fine folks couldn’t be missed. One of the lessons that James later taught us, is that you don’t know someone unless you have tested with her or him. So, we formed a Miagi-Do team consisting of Matt Heusser, Michael Larsen, Ajay Balamurugadas, Elena Houser, Adam Yuret, Simon Schrijver, Justin Hunter and Pete Schneider (sorry, I forgot your last name). Not all of them were Miagi-Do testers, but we kicked butt, I think. Since Matt was part of our team, we knew right from the start that we wouldn’t win any of the US-$ 1401 that James had set as a price. Here is my report on how the competition and the aftermath went.

Continue reading CAST 2011: A report on the Testing Competition →
Context-driven Testing, Leadership, Testing

CAST 2011: Context-driven leadership

11 Comments

On my final day at CAST 2011 I attended James Bach‘s tutorial on context-driven leadership. He challenged us to challenge the principles of the context-driven school of testing, since he became nervous that no one did that in the past decade. This is my write-up of that challenge as a follow-up.

Continue reading CAST 2011: Context-driven leadership →