The Grand Index of Techniques

This is loosely organized right now. More structure will be applied as the list grows longer.

We need more techniques! To see where the demand lies, go to the project page.

Handling Bugs

• Cem Kaner's slides on bug advocacy. "A bug report is a tool that you use to sell the programmer on the idea of spending her time and energy to fix a bug." (This is a 743kb PDF file, but well worth the download.)
• Failure improvement is the process of taking one example of a failure and producing one or more examples that are more useful.
• Writing good bug reports is important. Here is an example of a decent bug report that could be better.
• Here is an example of a good bug report made more persuasive.
• A bug report is a tester's most obvious work product. Should bug reports be reviewed before being entered into the bug tracking system?
• "Does a Bug Make a Noise When It Falls in the Forest?", by Noel Nyman, discusses whether you should report a bug that you don't believe a customer could see. (This is a variant of the version in Software Testing and Quality Engineering Magazine, Volume 1, Number 4, July/August 1999.)
• A ten-item checklist, by Rex Black, for writing a good bug report.

Test Planning and Estimation

• Cem Kaner's technique of collaborative test planning is a way of deciding where to concentrate your effort when you have sixty person-years of work to do and only six person-years available. It assumes that you're at a point in the project where you can estimate testing tasks in detail. This page is a link to the paper, plus a discussion.
• Brian Marick provides a sample test plan for a small project. Joseph Tate produced a Word template from it.
• Brian Marick, James Bach, and Cem Kaner have a paper on evaluating test suites. Many of the questions can also be used to evaluate a test plan. Indeed, the test plan in the previous bullet was designed with those questions in mind.
• An article of Len DiMaggio's: "Reflections on Scheduling Software Tests, the Project Life Cycle, and the Last Minute Bug"

Automated Test Execution

• A survey of papers that discuss the issues of test automation.
• If you're thinking of implementing a test driver for a programmatic interface, read how others have done it first.
• "Useful Features of a Test Automation System", by James Bach.

Test Support Code

• A case study of adding test support code into a program. Doing that makes it easier to see if an internal data structure was created correctly. It can be difficult to check that from the program's output.

Regression Testing

Regression tests are tests that are run more than once. If the product or its environment have changed since the last time a test was run, it may find a new bug. Regression tests may be automated or manual.

• How many bugs do regression tests find? Most of the bugs in a project? Or just a few?

Exploratory Testing

• James Bach has defined exploratory testing as "an interactive process of concurrent product exploration, test design, and test execution." Here are some links to writings on this topic. You'll read about why to do it and how to do it.

Code Coverage

• These experience-based writeups explain the use of code coverage tools.

Test Design

• Staked application testing is a term of Cem Kaner's. It refers to testing a product by seeing if it can emulate another product.

Test Design Tips

These don't have enough weight to call them test design techniques in their own right; rather, they're things to keep in mind as you apply other design techniques.

• Try the next thing the user will try, and you'll see the bugs she would see.
• The environment always changes. Has the code anticipated that?

Developer Testing

• "Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests", by Kent Beck and Erich Gamma, describes the freeware test framework JUnit and how it's used.
• "Test First Design", by Michael Feathers, describes how he uses testing in design.
• Brian Marick provides a case study of fixing a bug. It's an example of writing the tests before writing the code.
• Some advice from Keith Stobie about testing code that handles exceptions (PDF).
• A short description of developer testing on a telecomm project using C++.
• A rewrite of the test-first design example from eXtreme Programming Installed. It used to be Smalltalk, now it's Ruby.