Paul Gerrard's blog

On Thursday's SIGIST meeting, it was great to have such a positive reaction to my workshop and closing talk.

The Fallibility axiom (p41) tells us our sources of knowledge are undependable. The tester is a human being and prone to error. The system is being tested because we are uncertain of its behaviour or reliability. As a consequence, the plan for any test worth running cannot be relied upon to be accurate before we follow it.

Last week I presented a talk called "Advancing Testing Using Axioms" at the First IIR Testing Forum in Helsinki, Finland.

Test Axioms have been formulated as a context-neutral set of rules for testing systems. Because they represent the critical thinking processes required to test any system, there are clear opportunities to advance the practice of testing using them.

The talk introduces "The First Equation of Testing" and discusses opportunities to use the Axioms to support test strategy development, test assessment and improvement and suggests that a tester skills framework could be an interesting by-product of the Axioms. Finally, "The Quantum Theory of Testing" is introduced.

Go to the web page for this talk.

The Project Euler site presents a collection of 'maths-related' problems to be solved by computer - 250+ of them and the site allows you to check your answers etc. You don't need to be a mathematician for all of them really, but you do need to be a good algorithm designer/programmer.

But it also reminded me of a recurring thought about something else. Could the problems be used as 'testing' problems too? The neat thing about some of them is that testing them isn't easy. Some problems have only one answer – they aren't very useful for testers - there is only one test case (or you need simply to write/reuse a parallel program to act as oracle). But others like problem 22 for example provide input files to process http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=22

As a matter of record, I wanted to post a note on my involvement with the testing certification scheme best known in the UK (and many other countries) as the ISEB Testing Certificate Scheme. I want to post some other messages commenting on the ISEB, ISTQB and perhaps other schemes too, so a bit of background might be useful.