Requirements and tests are just two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a user story or requirement without an acceptance criteria (test). These two meld into executable specification. Using gherkin syntax (given,when,then) we can represent requirements using examples and create specifications by example. As a potential customer I want to collect books in a…

In many situations, there are a lot of business rules that need to be tested. Say we want to test that the correct discounts get applied based on a certain number of items that are in a shopping cart. To test these rules, most testers will go through the UI and hop through several steps to…

Test driven development or test driven design is a programming approach where before the developer writes any code, she first writes an automated test. This test will fail at first because no code exists. Then she write enough code to make the test pass. After that she might want to clean up or refactor her approach,…

Testing is everyone’s responsibility. The entire team works collectively to develop a quality product. Most of the automation is done by the people writing the code using an approach known as Test Driven Development or Test Driven Design (TDD). This includes unit, integration, component, and system tests. These tests verify that the application works as intended.…

What does your task board say about your team? Many teams have a separate testing column. This indicates that we are still doing hand-offs from development to testing and that testing is an afterthought. Testing is not a phase that happens at the end of a project and it’s not a phase that happens at the…

Most teams today use an inverted pyramid where most of the tests are manual User Acceptance Tests and System tests and are manually executed via the UI. Unit tests are non-existent or are too few to be beneficial. In order to have a maintainable test suite, as explained in this post, the base of our pyramid…

When trying to decide how to distribute our testing efforts and how many tests to write for each different type, it’s important to consider: Test coverage: How much of the code has a test that verifies its behaviorTest execution time: How long does it take to run the test and get a result backTest feedback: How…