Stockholm, the city where Rene Descartes spent his last days, and which now hands out Nobel prizes, is also now becoming a capital of Context-Driven testing thinking. The cool kid of the North. (Oh, why can’t your brothers Germany and Netherlands be more like you?) This past weekend I shared a room with some of [...]

A person named Shiva contacted me on Skype back in May. Then he didn’t say anything for several months, until yesterday we had this exchange. Shiva: Hi James! James: Hi. Shiva: I wanted to set up some time with you to chat about an idea and interest you in it…what would be a good time [...]

I’ll be traveling and training this fall. Take note of where I’ll be, because if I come near where you are and want some relatively free consulting, all you have to do is take me to dinner. I’ll do almost anything for free food. September Reston, Virginia San Diego, California October Stockholm, Sweden Tartu, Estonia [...]

Most of the testing world is managed around artifacts: test cases, test documents, bug reports. If you look at any “test management” tool, you’ll see that the artifact-based approach permeates it. “Test” for many people is a noun. For me test is a verb. Testing is something that I do, not so much something that [...]

An exploratory DOCTOR is known as… a “doctor.” An exploratory WELDER is known as… a “welder.” An exploratory PILOT is known as… a “pilot.” An exploratory WRITER is known as… a “writer.” An exploratory SCIENTIST is known as… a “scientist.” An exploratory TRUCK DRIVER is known as… a “truck driver.” A non-exploratory doctor is known [...]

I have often said something like “We found a hundred bugs!” Lots of people have heard me say it. Statements like that are very valuable to me. But we should ask some vital questions about them. Consider Raisin Bran cereal. If you lived in America and weren’t in solitary confinement during the 80′s an 90′s [...]

Regular readers know that I’m dissatisfied with the state of the testing industry. It’s a shambles, and will continue to be as long as middle managers in big companies continue to be fat juicy targets for scam-artists (large tool vendors, consulting firms, and certain “professional” organizations) and well-meaning cargo cultists (such as those who think [...]

Pradeep blogged this, today. I need to amplify it because it provides a nice example of at least six useful and important patterns all in one post. This is why I believe Pradeep is one of the leading Indian testers. Practical advice: “Ask for testability” His story is all about asking for testability and all [...]

One of the comments on my post about The Esssence of Heuristics went like this: “An excellent example of a heuristic is a hammer.” Ecstasy is your friend: it picks you up at the airport. Non heuristics that can help an expert solve a problem, without being a guarantee – an abridged list: * Money [...]

A lot of what I do is give names to testing behaviors and patterns that have been around a long time but that people are not systematically studying or using. I’m not seeking to create a standard language, but simply by applying some kind of terminology, I want to make these patterns easier to apply [...]

Excellent testing requires skill, but heuristics give structure to that skill. Heuristics help us access our skills under pressure. A heuristic is a fallible method of solving a problem or making a decision. Cem Kaner and I came to this definition based on an extensive search of papers and books across fifty years of psychology [...]

Stuart Reid is planning to do a talk on how we should use “evidence” in our debates about what works and doesn’t work in testing. A funny thing about that is Stuart once spent 30 minutes trying to convince me that the number “35,000″ was evidence of how great the ISEB certification is, as in [...]

A former fellow of the ISTQB sent me some secret dirt about the ISTQB qualifications process. (Editors Note: The ISTQB is the organization of cash-grubbing bullies that runs advertisements that say things like “join the elite”– meaning “pay us to give you a ridiculous and unnecessary exam that almost everyone passes so that dimwitted managers [...]

I just discovered that all new comments were being sent to the spam instead of held for moderation. I have no idea what has triggered this strange behavior. If you have made a comment in the last couple of weeks and didn’t see it appear, it maybe lost. Please try again. I did manage to [...]

Yesterday, I got to thinking about what I like to do. I want to be an expert. I’ve always wanted to be an expert. I’m aspiring to be that. I recalled that Steve McQueen played my kind of expert, in the movie The Towering Inferno. So, I found a clip and added subtitles to turn [...]