I’ve been watching television commercials about the amazing new world of technology since about 1997. You know the ones: people accessing the web on their phones, doctors diagnosing patients from 10,000 miles away, or people attending universities online, or meeting via video screens. The thing is, mostly this technology hasn’t worked. Mostly it has been […]

James Wang, from China, has begun translating my blog into Chinese. I’ve never been to China, but it’s the sixth most popular source of visitors to my blog.
I have no way to know how good the translations are, but I will continue to use American idioms and jargon that will tax the hardiest polylingual logophile– […]

I often criticize pre-scripted testing. It’s not a fundamentally bad idea, but it’s strangely over-hyped. Many writers in the field act as if they suffer from anterograde amnesia– like in the movie Memento, where the guy can’t form new memories and must write everything down or he will instantly forget it. They claim an unscripted […]

Today I am writing about the Context-Driven school of software testing. This is a community that initially coalesced around Cem Kaner’s Los Altos Workshops on Software Testing (the LAWST meetings), in the late 90’s. I am a founding member of that community.
In the last two years, more people have joined the community of active context-driven […]

A search on Google for the exact phrase “suggested best practice” turned up 9,230 hits, while “suggested best practices” turned up 30,300.
I wonder what the difference is between a suggested practice and a suggested best practice?
Is best a matter of suggestion? I don’t think so. What is lost by removing the word “best”? Like a […]

A correspondent writes:
“I have a test management problem. We have a maintenance project. It contains about 20 different applications. Three of them are bigger in terms of features and also the specs that are available. I am told that these applications had more than 1-2 testers on each of these applications. But in this maintenance […]