I just read this quote by E.F. Schumacher: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Let’s have a touch of genius because our future systems are becoming more and more complex. Those systems need to be integrated with other systems. This in turn will lead to an even more increased complexity. This increased complexity also has its effect on testing. How can we handle this increased complexity?

We will need more information about the system(s) we’re testing, the client’s real wishes about this system and the business processes that control the system. With this information we can estimate what is needed for testing and make the correct adjustments to our testing process. But what information is needed?

Most of the information we need, is already available, but it needs to be interpreted correctly. For example information about the connections, business processes, users, testers, developers, used techniques and earlier testing. But we need to streamline this information. And when we have this information we can use this in a real-time view of the system with perhaps all its defects and missing items; Augmented Testing.

With Augmented Testing it’s an option to use this information as a layer over the System under Test (SuT) so all the information about the system under test while testing is available in real-time. By creating a structure that interlinks all this known information with each other and even added information this information can be made available. When this information is readily and in real-time available it can be ‘projected’ over the SuT. 

 Click image to enlarge.

This Augmented Testing can be the touch of genius we testers need!

1. Justin Hunter Says:
   December 9th, 2009 at 18:32

   Sounds very cool! Please post more details in an upcoming blog.

   - Justin Hunter

2. Richard Enthoven Says:
   December 13th, 2009 at 11:24

   This could be a great invention for displaying known findings into an application – as you show in the picture. Or for displaying the test cases itself into the application.

   Is there already a tool available to do this?

3. Ewald Roodenrijs Says:
   December 17th, 2009 at 14:30

   @Richard
   Unfortunately not yet. But I am talking with some people to get this created. Problem lies more in how to get the information without an integrated and expensive tool.

   @ Justin
   Thanks. I will do.

   - Ewald

4. Rohit Sharma Says:
   December 21st, 2009 at 11:48

   You can create picture using SnagIt tool,
   its damn easy.

5. Software Testing Services Says:
   August 18th, 2010 at 09:32

   Great invention. Its really very helpful as it allows to embed the information available into the application. Hope it will come soon so everybody will be benefited from this.

6. Trackbacks Says:
   September 4th, 2010 at 00:16
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