The Joy of Testing: July 2011

Good judgment comes from experience;
experience comes from bad judgment.
--Frederick P. Brooks

Trying to improve software quality
by increasing the amount of testing
is like trying to lose weight
by weighing yourself more often.
--Steve McConnell

I hope this isn’t a shock,

but customers don’t really care about testing.

At some level, I suppose

they care that some effort went into testing the product

before they spent money on it,

but they’re not at all concerned

with most of the actual work

that testers do.

--Alan Page, Principal SDET at Microsoft Corporation,

No matter what the problem is,
it's always a people problem.
--Geraldm Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming

If you've found 3 bugs in a program, best estimate is that there are 3 more.
60% of product cost comes after initial shipment.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
-- Albert Einstein

Wexelblat's Scheduling Algorithm:
Choose two:

Good
Fast
Cheap

--Richard Wexelblat

André Bensoussan once explained to me the difference between a programmer and a designer:
"If you make a general statement,
a programmer says, 'Yes, but...'
while a designer says, 'Yes, and...'"

do it
do it right
do it right now
It is not enough to do your best: you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.
-- W. Edwards Deming

Deming's 14 points:

Create constancy of purpose.
Adopt the new philosophy.
Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality.
Minimize total cost, not initial price of supplies.
Improve constantly the system of production and service.
Institute training on the job.
Institute leadership.
Drive out fear.
Break down barriers between departments.
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and numerical targets.
Eliminate work standards (quotas) and management by objective.
Remove barriers that rob workers, engineers, and managers of their right to pride of workmanship.
Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
Put everyone in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.

When somebody begins a sentence with "It would be nice if..."
the right thing to do is to wait politely for the speaker to finish.
No project ever gets around to the it-would-be-nice features: or if they do, they regret it.
Wait for sentences that begin "We have to..." and pay close attention, and see if you agree.
-- Tom Van Vleck

Q: How many QA testers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: QA testers don't change anything. They just report that it's dark.
--Kerry Zallar

"One test is worth a thousand opinions."
"If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen."

This saying is popular among scientists (doing experiments),
but I believe it applies to software testing, particularly for real-time systems.
--Larry Zana

Software is Too Important to be Left to Programmers
--Meilir Page-Jones

If you think good architecture is expensive,
try bad architecture.
--Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder

... while we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery,
we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained,
nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces.
We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement.
We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy.
-- E. W. Dijkstra, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3

We testers will never enjoy complete certainty in our job,

but we can measure and take steps to reduce the uncertainty of our task.

--A Tester

Everybody Knows:
Discipline is the best tool.
Design first, then code.
Don't patch bugs out, rewrite them out.
Don't test bugs out, design them out.

If you don't understand it, you can't program it.
If you didn't measure it, you didn't do it.

If something is worth doing once, it's worth building a tool to do it.

Your problem is another's solution;
Your solution will be his problem.

The Joy of Testing

Friday, 1 July 2011

Some links for Testing

Certifications

Some quotes on software