Justin

1,473 reputation

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bio	website	hexawise.com
	location	Chapel Hill, NC
	age	44
visits	member for	2 years
	seen	yesterday
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I am the founder and CEO of Hexawise. I'm interested in using Design of Experiments methods from applied statistics to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of software testing. The Hexawise test design tool improves coverage with the fewest possible number of tests. It uses pairwise, and other, more sophisticated methods of optimized combination testing.

See http://www.hexawise.com

	1,473 reputation	bio	website	hexawise.com	visits	member for	2 years
217 badges		location	Chapel Hill, NC		seen	yesterday

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19 Comments

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Oct 26	comment	Is there a guide or systematic way of writing test scenarios? Laura, Great suggestion. I've updated my answer to include your improvement to it.
Oct 8	comment	Techniques for test selection, give a large suite of test cases Those articles are not about just any type of test generation; they're all about a specific type of test generation. Namely, generating tests in a systematic way so as to cover as much as possible in as few tests as possible. They are about minimizing the size of your test suite for a given scope. These approaches are extremely powerful and well-proven, yet they remain wildly underutilized in the software testing community. The test generation approaches described in the articles work equally well whether you have an existing set of tests or you're generating a new set from scratch.
Sep 27	comment	Techniques for test selection, give a large suite of test cases D.W., Kudos for trying to find actual empirical evidence! I would suggest these additional articles for you. They do a good job of explaining how test suite reduction techniques have been effectively put into practice: combinatorialtesting.com/clear-introductions-1
Sep 7	comment	Capture screen during exploratory testing Upvoted. If you want both a screen shot and a way to keep track of tester comments throughout an exploratory testing session, Rapid Reporter is truly fantastic. A very nice example of Rapid Reporter in action (with screen shots shown amidst a tester's comments about their developing thought process throughout the exploratory testing session) can be found here: testing.gershon.info/rapidreporter/pairingrr/AngryWeaselTheApp/…
Dec 7	comment	What online games (ideally with a bunch of glitches) would make for a good software testing training exercise? Dan, I would prefer a game if possible to have some fun, get non-game testers out of their shells and out of their comfort zones a little bit. Part of the challenge I have in mind will be to "parameterize" user playing styles and possible user actions which is not a traditional test design technique most of them will be familiar with. Thanks.
Sep 24	comment	Are state transition diagrams a good software testing technique +1 Superb answer, Dale!
Jul 19	comment	Can exploratory testing replace executing manual functional tests? +1 for Chuck's suggestion, which I love. I am a HUGE proponent of running experiments and capturing data. Doing so helps people learn a lot. In the absence of actual data, opinions prevail. The opinions that prevail often belong to those with the loudest voices and/or are HIPPO's (the Highest Paid Person's Opinion). Experiment. A Google search for W. Edwards Deming and PDSA would pull up some interesting articles and blog posts on this topic.
May 25	comment	What are the benefits of Block Testing? +1 for a wonderfully clear explanation and an additional +1 if I could vote it up again for these great sentences that should be carved in stone: "In the end, the math doesn't really matter. The reason to measure coverage isn't to produce a number - it's to help you discover what areas of the code are not covered by your testing so you can determine if more testing is needed. In other words, coverage testing is a method of discovering new tests."
May 24	comment	Is it worth investing much time into iteration testing? Dustin, You wrote your own software to create 2-way and 3-way coverage?! Cool! You're a man after my own heart. It's a shame so few testers know about these powerful test design methods. Please check out our Hexawise test case design tool and let me know your feedback. My experience confirms your assertion that moving from 2-way (pairwise) to 3-way tests has a much lower ROI than the 2-way tests because you'll often quadruple the # of tests executed to get to 3-way coverage with a much lower number of new defects found per test as compared to the bugs per test ratio from the 2-way tests.
May 23	comment	Alternatives to Session Tester for recording exploratory test session results +1 Rapid Reporter is a great tool and Shmuel Gershon (who developed it) is excellent at the tricky balancing act of incorporating input from users without having that lead to a tool plagued by "feature bloat." The result is that Rapid Reporter is a very nice tool that is extremely easy to use that has the vast majority of the features most users are likely to want. In addition, it doesn't take up much room on your screen when you're testing.
May 20	comment	When is it OK not to have dedicated testers/QA team? Bruce, I disagree. Here is why: If the question were "I wonder when does the absence of dedicated quality assurance people does not lead to decreased quality of delivered software?"... I would agree with your point (and could accept the validity of your down vote). That was not the entire question however. The question begins: "It just came into my mind that there are no dedicated QAs in stackexchange team. Since they are indeed making an awesome product,..." Hence the references are, IMHO, extremely valid.
May 20	comment	QTP vs Selenium I strongly disagree that questions like this should be closed. I would MUCH rather see thoughtful analyses of the pro's and cons of tools (and other potentially decisive issues) aired and decide for myself which perspectives I find more compelling than have moderators conclude that participants are too immature to discuss the issues politely and rationally. If participants can't be trusted to discuss topics like this politely and rationally, the community has bigger issues to worry about.
May 20	comment	How is Selenium different from other GUI automation tools? Please don't close questions like these. Vote down vapid answers if you like but thoughtful answers to questions like these have the potential to be extremely useful to many people.
May 19	comment	Where can I find some insightful cartoons and/or humorous content about software testing? Also, see: stackoverflow.com/questions/528311/… as a precedent of a similar question that has been open on stackoverflow for several years. Like this one, it asks, "Is there cartoon-based content (related directly to the subject matter of the community) that is suitable to helping me advance my professional objectives?"
May 19	comment	Where can I find some insightful cartoons and/or humorous content about software testing? Thanks for your views. To clarify, I actually did edit it a great deal to establish the case for why it is a "real" question vs. one that could be construed as "mindless social fun". I wasn't aware of the vote to re-open options or flag for moderator attention options.
May 19	comment	Where can I find some amusing cartoons about software testing? +1 for making it a community wiki. Great idea. A community wiki is a good way to go for a highly subjective question like this that (A) is more about trying to find multiple pretty good sources as opposed to finding "the one best answer" and (B) where good answers don't require a lot of explanation / detailed reasoning.
May 18	comment	What types of testing are LEAST suited to using pairwise testing (and similar test design approaches)? Rsf, Thanks for sharing your experiences. FYI, many pairwise test design tools have constraint handling features that mitigate the first problem (e.g., when some parameters are dependent upon others). Also, about the debugging challenge issue, while a valid point, (a) in my experience, I'd rather have the problem of "How do we debug this reproduce-able defect?" if the alternative would be "Why didn't we detect this defect during testing?", and (b) you can often quickly eliminate the vast majority of possible causes by looking at passed tests that contain similar combinations of test inputs.
May 18	comment	Developers have code kata to practice skills. What test equivalents are there? Thanks. I agree about Markus' speed. Seeing the huge number of Markus' blog posts uploaded during testing meetings is impressive.
May 17	comment	How do you adapt agile testing techniques to a regulated industry? Up voting. Nicely said Joel. I was going to say something similar, but you beat me to it. Tristaan, James Bach has spoken about achieving the paper trial objectives in a recent project he worked on (where he was helping to test medical equipment). They used a document-light, ET approach. A Google search might result in some interesting advice from James. (As if James gave any other kind of advice; always can always be counted on to keep things interesting).