TWST3 was the second time I had seen Cem present. The first time I talked about over here and I think that of the two talks, the one he brought this time was the weaker content-wise. Ironically though, I got more notes from it. Before I get to those notes, everyone should go over to his blog and read the most recent post regarding the Principles of Law of Software Contracts. The impact of this is going to be very large with anyone who has customers in the US.

And now the notes

  • There are two types of risk; product and project
  • Bug catalogs can (and do) go out of date
  • Some uses for bug catalogs
    • Test idea generation
    • Test plan auditing
    • Getting unstuck
    • Training new staff
  • Relatively new testers fail when using catalogs (in Cem’s experience of training testers)
  • To audit a test plan
    • Make a list of risks/failures
    • Find each in the test plan
  • heuristic – if a bug can be imagined in more than one place in you product, include it in the list
  • If you don’t know if there is a risk, the risk is your lack of knowledge of the potential risk
  • Mindjet Mindmanager (mindmaps are something I’m becoming more and more interested in)
  • A generative taxonomy a structure to make classifications
  • look for classes of bugs that were missed (fundamental blindness risk)
  • Too oftem people get bogged down in the obsession to categorize risks
  • Taxonomy generation should be iterative