Unpack your toolkit…

Glad to be on the program of the QA&Test conference this year again. This year I’ll be talking about test techniques. When talking about test techniques we often refer to the test design techniques. But, Design techniques are not the only techniques, think about error creation and error recognition techniques, that will benefit our testing.  Reading the Agile extension of the BABOK guide, I realized there are much more different techniques to complete our toolkit.

I made a small model that I will use to map the techniques. I’ll still need to do some research.  Let’s find out where it brings me…

Technique classification Model, first version.

Trends in testing: Benchmark report by SwissQ

Today I received the Testing Trend & Benchmark Report 2013. I always like it to compare what trends are predicted by different voices in the market. It is vital to benchmark, because when I speak about the mayor trends sometimes the reaction I get is: ” ….but that is not really new, is it?”  Right. Nice to see that the first conclusion made by SwissQ is precisely that:

“There are less new developments and more enhancement and maintenance projects”

Another conclusion that appeals to me is number 7:

“The maturity of the requirements engineering processes is still lagging behind testing. Insufficient requirements are still considered the biggest challenge in testing”

Very recognizable. Ever since, I have been involved more with IIBA, I came to the same conclusion. My prognose is that BA and Testing will merge in the future. There is a lot that we can learn from the BA-ers, but as the SwissQ benchmark states, before the disciplines merge the BA field might need to make some growing steps also.

The report contains a nice trend curve shows what topics are on the rise and which hypes are already declining.  For me it contained some surprises. I’d expected MMT and Mobile to be more mature. But, is it like you expected?