Testing Blog

The Plague of Amnesia

Monday, July 13, 2009
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Labels: James Whittaker

6 comments :

  1. edfJuly 14, 2009 at 9:14:00 AM PDT

    I test Web Applications for a living and the thing that bothers me the most is how hard it is to automate browser testing. Firefox requires you to inject script through a plugin. Safari (on Windows) requires you to special html tags. IE requires you to use the awful COM library. Plus, you have to use 2 different tools to test the Browser components vs. the Web Application. It would be nice to have a browser automation standard.

    As far as Chrome is concerned, I would add these to the Chrome questions: How will Google use what it's learned from chrome testing to help others that need to test their web application in Chrome? How will Google make it's Chrome testing reusable by others? How will Google share tidbits gained from testing Chrome to others.

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  2. Martin HJuly 14, 2009 at 9:43:00 AM PDT

    Nice Article.

    The ease at which many of us forget is quite scary. Whether it's forgetting or refusing to learn from previous mistakes is another thing all together.

    You may find that people are not suffering Amnesia, but due to time / monetary / and staffing constraints things get left out meaning that teams get stung with the same issues over and over again.

    Some easy to use tips that we use here some that hopefully others will find useful is WIKI's these are great for jotting down easy to remember information and they are usually opensource so zero cost to the organisation.
    BrownBags to share knowledge over lunch hours is another, Again breaking those knowlesge silo's means that everyone benefits even the person hold the BrownBag by comments and questions they never thought of.

    I also have a few more over at my site under the Tag of Productivity.

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  3. Simon MorleyJuly 16, 2009 at 1:25:00 PM PDT

    Some of these amnesia affects shouldn't happen.

    Whatever method or process you use in testing, reporting is vital.

    This is important for many reasons, one of the biggest is for the test team to consolidate and distill their findings and recommendations.

    It's important that the team can give a good account of what they've done/achieved, what they didn't accomplish and why, issues found with any recommended actions and an overall summary with points to bear in mind for the future and any desirable further action.

    It's this group summary that's a very important input to the next team that works with the product/feature. Previous reports alongside new requirements for the next iteration.

    The documentation/report can be as lightweight as needed - it's the story that it tells (for whoever does the next iteration or flavour of the product) that's important.

    If you're not documenting your work as a test team then it's not complete and you're asking for trouble - or amnesia ;-)

    In answer to the final question I can't remember always, hence the need to write and document...

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  4. dfsdJuly 20, 2009 at 4:30:00 AM PDT

    Amnesia is normal.

    When you do a project you may have to solve 1000 hard problems. future projects may have 1 or 2 problems of the same type.

    Yes it whould be good to share and information about how to solve those 1000 problems. but it is just to much information.

    Solving the same problem in differnt ways until one single solution is part of the programing culture, this is the way, i don't think there is another way arround it.

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  5. AlexJuly 20, 2009 at 10:09:00 PM PDT

    Completely agree with dfsd. Amnesia is rare illness. When we speak of testing, we should think of one of greatest gifts of human being - ability to forget. It's great in other words that we do not remember exactly how to we tested this or that previous time. Yes, we spend some more on making up new plan for this feature. But it will guarantee that the little train of our testing process do not miss (I hope) this time the station, it missed before. Each project should be something new, fresh, something that inspires you to do your best and not to copy-paste only.
    So just be positive :)

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  6. AnonymousJune 8, 2010 at 1:25:00 PM PDT

    Inspiring piece of text I agree with totally.
    I think the business of software testing only has a relatively short term memory at the moment.

    Just go around and ask test consultants what they think of work published by William Hetzel, David Gelperin, Barry Boehm, Thomas McCabe, Boris Beizer, Glenford Myers, Gerald Weinberg, William Elmendorf, Michael Fagan, Edward Miller or William Howden and you will find out soon enough how well the collective memory is functioning.

    It was your post, by the way, that inspired a thought process that eventually led me to creating a history of software testing. See my website Testing References for that.

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