The Latest

Exploratory testing is both a craft and a science. It requires intuition and critical thinking.

Testing doesn't have to begin after the code has been written. In this column, Jeff Patton resurrects the oldest and most overlooked development technique, which can be used to test a product before any piece of it materializes.

The $1 billion bug and why no one talks about peer code review.

 It was only supposed to take an hour.

The bad news was that we had a stack of customer complaints. The latest release had a nasty bug that slipped through QA. The good news was that some of those complaints included descriptions of the problem - an unexpected error dialog box - and one report had an attached log file. We just had to reproduce the problem using the log and add this case to the unit tests. Turn around a quick release from the stable branch and we're golden.

This article introduces target- and pattern-specific variables and shows how they can be used to selectively alter options within a build based on the name of a target or targets being built.

Software development requires a variety of skills, but organizations shouldn’t assume that a worker can move to a new position—be it analyst, manager, or tester—without task-specific education or assistance.
 

Programmers must balance time, business needs, and a long-term maintenance profile while producing code. Are you willing to accept the easy path now, even if it means trouble down the road? Tod Golding explains that the fastest way may not always be the right way.

Decades of testing practices are available to today's testers, but sometimes the "old school" approaches are just as powerful as newer tools with evolved frills and features. Chris McMahon offers tips on how you can combine test techniques to improve your agile integration project.