Crouching Tester Hidden Defect – A Paper on Where Bugs Hide

Visit | Latest Whitepapers | August 3, 2011

By Adam Hughes
Senior Test Consultant, Planit Software Testing

ABSTRACT: Bugs – just how many are there, and where do they hide? This paper looks at some of the different types of software bugs, what can lead to bugs occurring, where they might be hiding in your software, how many there could are, and how they can be found in the most efficient manner.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Testers knew where the bugs were going to be, before they started testing; if they could target certain areas of the code, even before they start designing test cases? Some organisations have a body of bugs that have been discovered on previous projects. Fewer have undertaken causal analysis against those bugs in order to understand their root causes. Fewer still have a catalogue of where each bug occurred, and can use that catalogue to identify where bugs are likely to occur on similar, future projects. A very small number of organisations can confidently predict how many bugs they need to find and fix, before it is safe to “go-live”. For other organisations, it’s a bit of a guess…

Kinds of Bugs
Boris Beizer is famous for his books and lectures on the topic of Software Testing. He is possibly most famous for initiating the largest study into bugs ever undertaken1. The study looked at tens of thousands of bugs across the software development industry over a period of a decade, and found that there were less than 200 bugs in the Software World, but that these same bugs were constantly repeated across industries, and around the Globe. The bugs studied fell into the following high-level categories …

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The Recipe to Success

Visit | Latest Whitepapers | February 8, 2011

By Leanne Howard
Account Director, Planit Software Testing

ABSTRACT: This paper compares the similarities between following the Test Process for software development and following a recipe for baking a cake. Advice is offered in regards to choosing recipes, gathering ingredients and using tools to assist in creating a product that meets the standards of the recipe.

I love cooking in my spare time. As I was baking a lovely chocolate cake over the weekend I found that I was comparing the recipe to a Test Process. By making something challenging seem like an everyday activity (at least for me) I hope this paper helps with your understanding. Maybe you will be able to bake a cake next weekend too!

Choose your recipe / framework
Well where to start? That’s easy we have a recipe and often a picture to see what the end product should look like. OK, maybe not that easy, you may not have a picture and find it difficult to visualise, or now you see that beautiful cake and feel a bit intimidated. I have got an answer for both. First, the fact that you may not have a picture, don’t let that stop you. This takes a bit of preparation upfront as if you decide to bake and have not done your research you may be stuck without that picture. But if you’ve thought about it
beforehand you have a number of options. Try another of your recipe books, they may have one or at least one similar. Talk to your friends, they may have one you can borrow or failing that, look it up on the Internet, there are hundreds of examples there to help…

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Agile – Why the Fear?

Visit | Latest Whitepapers | September 3, 2010

By Leanne Howard
Account Director, Planit Software Testing

ABSTRACT: Agile software development is a subject that can polarise IT professionals, with strong views on both sides. This paper looks at some of the Agile principles and how they fit into current work practices regardless of the methodology being followed. These are practices that can help the testing team meet the business need to deliver projects faster, while not compromising quality.

The technology & software development industries are very good at adopting the latest technology trends and development practices but these trends and practices often polarise opinion on how good or bad the new technology or software development practices are. Agile software development processes and methods is probably the most potent example of where the industries practitioners range from supportive and embracing of the concepts, through to those who simply see another example of an excuse for bad practice or make statements to their peers “that it will never work in our organisation”.

It is our observation that much of this polarisation appears to be driven by a lack of understanding of what it actually means to be “agile” or more importantly, what “agile” means within the context of the individual, i.e. what role they perform, and their organisations software development context, i.e. the type of software development they perform….

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