Michael Bolton, my brother Jon, and I have produced a new version of our Exploratory Testing Dynamics document. We unveiled it last week at STPCON.
This document describes the elements of exploratory testing as we currently understand them. This new version has not yet been reviewed by Cem Kaner or any of our colleagues who normally [...]

An open letter to James Whittaker:
You wrote: “I had an amicable hallway conversation with James Bach. His blogger angst at my use of the title ‘Exploratory Testing’ didn’t spill over to a face-to-face discussion. Frankly, I am not surprised. I’ve never claimed the term as my own, I simply took it and made it work [...]

When Cem Kaner introduced the term “exploratory testing” in the mid-80’s, everyone ignored it. When I picked up the term and ran with it, I was mostly ignored. But slowly, it spread through the little community that would become the Context-Driven School. I began talking about it in 1990, and created the first ET class [...]

I told James Whittaker that I don’t use the term “manual testing” and that I prefer the term “sapient testing” because it’s more to the point. This is evident in the first definition of the word “manual” in the Oxford English Dictionary: ” 1. a. Of work, an action, a skill, etc.: of or relating [...]

Context-driven testing is apparently very difficult to understand. I wouldn’t have thought that it’s a difficult concept, except for the last decade I’ve watched hundreds of people in terrible confusion. Testers outside of the United States have an especially hard time with it, for some reason that escapes me.
I do have some working theory of [...]

When my publisher decided to release my Secrets book for “free” as an ebook, I thought it meant FREE. I just found it meant free-for-a-little-while-and-then-gone. Apparently it has some sort of DRM expiration date on it.
[Update: One of my tester friends found that he could defeat the expiration mechanism by playing with the system date, [...]

Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar is now available in electronic form. You can get it from Simon & Schuster, or less expensively on the Kindle from Amazon.com.
The book is about learning. It’s about alternatives to schooling and certification. But it also describes how I became a tester, and why I progressed as a tester.
The hardcover version, [...]

The CAST testing conference is happening in Colorado Springs, July 13-16. I mention this for two reasons:
1. I will be teaching a testing tutorial there. I also will be wandering around with my various testing games and challenges hoping to do them with anyone who wants to see what I mean by “testing skills.”
2. CAST [...]

Take a look at the screen shot, below. This is from my first five minutes of playing with Wolfram/Alpha. Do you see what’s wrong with it? I’ll tell you in a minute…
Wolfram/Alpha is the new search engine that isn’t so much a search engine as a find-interesting-ways-to-analyze-data-and-show-it-to-me engine. It’s a closed system, as far as [...]

…a radio call-in show. It is not an open public forum.
Sometimes I get complaints about how I handle comments. I received a quite thoughtful and persuasive complaint just a few hours ago. There is a teeny-tiny link on the front page of my blog that goes to my policy on comments, but I suspect few [...]

Beware, if you visit WebGreeter.com a disturbing thing will happen. You will be immediately accosted by what appears to be a chatbot, but is apparently a human doing a creepy impression of a chatbot. This cyborg thing will ask you for your contact information. If you give it to them, they may use it right [...]

Check out Is there a problem here?
This is just what our craft needs. This wonderful, simple service brought to us by Ben Simo (AKA QualityFrog) documents bugs found in the field. I can use this in training new testers.
There is a little problem with it: It’s biased toward reporting problems that are vividly depicted in [...]

If you ever wondered what happens when you quit LinkedIn and then come back again, I can report that all your contacts will be gone. I expected that. But I didn’t expect that the recommendations I wrote for other people would also disappear. To those for whom I wrote recommendations– sorry! I thought they would [...]

Now that I have symmetrical 4 megabit Internet access at my island office, I am able to offer live 90-minute webinars. Using GoToMeeting (a pretty good screensharing service that can connect with up to 10 people), I can speak to any small group. I am able to respond to questions and demonstrate some kinds of [...]

Tobbe Ryber (English pronunciation: Tobey Ruber) is the most famous Swedish tester I know. He is finally blogging in English, so I’m sure he’s about to become even better known.
Tobbe is a context-driven thinker who has a lot to say about test design tactics. He also innovates with tester training exercises and with developing community [...]