Spek

Recently, I was going through some of the design patterns in Java by reading the book Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra.

Agile software development stems from a philosophy that being agile means creating and responding to change swiftly. Agile means having the ability to adapt and respond to change without dissolving into chaos. Being Agile involves teamwork built on diverse capabilities, skills, and talents. Team members include both the business and software development sides working together to produce working software that meets or exceeds customer expectations continuously.

QA testers have a unique role and responsibility to serve the customer. Serving the customer in software testing means protecting customers from application defects, failures, and perceived failures from missing or misunderstood requirements. Testing for known requirements based on documentation or discussion is the core of the testing profession. One unique way QA testers can both differentiate themselves and be innovative occurs when senseshaping is used to improve the application user experience.

“Test frequently and early.” If you’ve been following my testing agenda, you’re probably sick of hearing me repeat that. However, it is making sense that if your tests detect an issue soon after it occurs, it will be easier to resolve. This is one of the guiding concepts that makes continuous integration such an effective method. I’ve encountered several teams who have a lot of automated tests but don’t use them as part of a continuous integration approach. There are frequently various reasons why the team believes these tests cannot be used with continuous integration. Perhaps the tests take too long to run, or they are not dependable enough to provide correct results on their own, necessitating human interpretation.

In my last blog, I investigated both the stateless and the stateful class of model-based testing. Both have some advantages and disadvantages. You can use them for different types of systems, depending on whether a stateful solution is required or a stateless one is enough. However, a better solution is to use an aggregate technique that is appropriate for each system. Currently, the only aggregate solution is action-state testing, introduced in the book Paradigm Shift in Software Testing. This method is implemented in Harmony.