There seems to be a lot of confusion about this.
Test automation is any use of tools to aid testing. Test automation has been around since DAY ONE of the computing industry. And never in that history has test automation been an “automatic way of doing what testers were doing before”, unless you ignore a lot […]

Sometimes people hear about the Context-Driven School of Testing and tell me there’s no need for it, because nobody disagrees with the importance of context.
And then I read things like this from Alberto Savoia. I don’t know how to account for it, except to say that it’s the mentality that I’m fighting against. If you […]

Hey, somebody at AST must have read my blog when I coined the term “sapient testing“, because they named their magazine after it.
I’m still waiting for people to pick up on my other coinage: mythomimetic, which is an adjective meaning “not informed by experience or wisdom, but rather hearsay and wishful thinking.” I’ll use it […]

O happy day!
Thanks to the tireless webmastering efforts of Scott Barber, thanks to the original efforts of my brother Jon, David Gilbert, Michael Bolton, and myself as organizers, and thanks to the contestants who participated, the full video and print record of the second CAST testing competition is now online.
Friends, this is a first. It’s […]

I want to follow up on what I said about discipline in yesterday’s post. I said that discipline is “motivation without reason.” I stand by that, as far as it goes, but there’s more to discipline than that, and I want to tell the whole story.
The sense in which I am using the word discipline […]

I often consult on software process improvement. As part of that, I promote an idea called “heuristic process improvement”. Heuristic process improvement is different than the typical process improvement approach in that it centers on developing the skills of the people on the project, while developing heuristics (NOT rote procedures) to help them do […]

(This article is adapted from work I did with Johanna Rothman, at the 1st Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference. It’s never been widely published, so here you go.)
As a context-driven testing methodologist, I am required to think through the methods I use. Sometimes that means debating methodology with people who have a different view about what […]

Thanks to Michael Bolton, for plunging in at Eurostar after I had to cancel. He has blogged on it here and here.
For what it’s worth, this is the presentation I was going to give at Eurostar, before I had to drop out.
And interestingly, Matthew Heusser just blogged on one of my central ideas: that different […]

Recently I posted a sort-of attack on Jim Pensyl, who had posted a sort-of attack on my community. Then an interesting thing happened. He withdrew his blog post and called me on the phone. That was unexpected. Almost nobody de-escalates that way. The two normal responses are A) abandon the debate, or B) continue the […]

(I had written a critical analysis and response to a post by Jim Pensyl, AKA Jake Brake. Jim subsequently took down that post, and it seems the right thing to take down mine. However, I got two comments on my original piece, and I’ll leave those alone, especially the one by Steve Smith, a friend […]