See how operational definitions bring clarity to requirements and support earlier testing

An operational definition explains what a concept means in practical, measurable terms. It makes abstract or vague ideas concrete so that people are more likely to understand them in the same way and test them consistently. W. Edwards Deming wrote that "an operational definition puts communicable meaning into a concept. Adjectives like good, reliable, uniform, round, tired, safe, unsafe, unemployed have ot communicable meaning until they are expressed in operational terms of sampling, test and criterion." Out of the Crisis, (1986, chapter 9) Deming gave this example of an operational definition: “A specification test of a piece of metal or an assembly A criterion (or criteria) for judgement Decision: yes or no, the object or the material did or did not meet the criterion (or criteria)” Another example of operational definition would be: A specification, for example: As a Gmail user I want to log in to my Gmail account So that I can check my email Criteria, for example: Acceptance criteria I can see emails sent to my Gmail address A decision as to whether what is being tested meets the criteria, for example:The definition of "done" includes that all acceptance criteria will be tested

Gherkin is a domain-specific language (DSL) used primarily in behaviour-driven development (BDD) to define test cases in a human-readable format. It's the language that Cucumber, a popular BDD tool, uses to specify the behaviour of software systems. Gherkin's syntax is designed to be easily understood by both technical and non-technical team members, promoting collaboration and clear communication about requirements. The Cucumber Book by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy (2012, p7), says that Gherkin is a list of steps for a Cucumber test to work through, and so are the criteria used to test the work. Example: Feature: User Login Scenario: Successful Login Given the user is on the login page When the user enters valid credentials Then the user should be logged in

I was once corrected when I talked about continuous learning. Continuous means without a break, but we can’t learn without a break. Continual is a better word to describe human activity because it allows us to plateau for a while.

“Bug! Bug! Bug!” shouted my seven year old son as I said goodbye to him for the day. He loves this Bug t-shirt. So the two of us (Bug, not my son) stand ready at the train station. We’re all se...

66% of us seem to think so

Examples of how to test different sites and apps, along with the test heuristics applied, the reasoning and tool ideas. Nicola Lindgren, Mike Harris, Suman Bala, Philip Wong, and Shawn Shaligram

Walter Shewhart worked to improve the quality of telephones. He wrote that “every conceptual “something” is really a group of conceptions in more elementary form. The minimum number of conceptions required to define an object may be called the qualities thereof”. “In this sense a thing has qualities not a quality”. The qualities that Shewhart wrote about are now called quality attributes, so quality attributes can be defined as "the minimum number of conceptions required to define an object".

Recognise how different parts of a system influence one another

Four testers are presenting The Testing Planet news from their respective homes. Each is visible in their own video panel.

Data from performance and load tests can be difficult to interpret