I recently had another interesting conversation about testing. I’ve had this discussion many times throughout my career: What is software testing? Or perhaps more specifically, what isn’t testing? Typically, these conversations start with someone stating something that limits the bounds of testing in a way that I either don’t understand or don’t agree with. After twenty-plus years, my view has not shifted much. This article is not meant to be the universal truth. However, everything is based on what…

Anyone who has been in the software industry for a while has probably come across jokes, memes, or comments about the strained relationships between testers and developers. Testers get frustrated and complain about developers saying things like, “It works on my machine.” Meanwhile, developers dismissively joke that testers are people who couldn’t make it as developers because they’re too rigid and prone to thinking up new problems and unlikely edge cases.  Some people may read that…

Before I started working in software testing, I had never heard of heuristics. Over the years, I kept hearing the word “heuristics,” but I never really understood what they were or how to use them. The first time I deliberately researched the topic was for a workshop in 2019. Before this, I thought they were a fancy term used by a specific school of testing, but I learned that heuristics are a well-known and well-used concept in…