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 [...]