Oh, no! Another semantics post. Well, yes. Since semantics is at the core of many misunderstandings, it’s worth looking at it from just another perspective in order to see if your meaning is my meaning. When speaking of semantics and meaning, we need to distinguish between words that carry meaning and those that are primarily used… Continue Reading →
I recently stumbled upon a tool called AntConc in an archive-folder on an old external hard drive and couldn’t help but analyze my blog with it. So, what is AntConc anyway? It’s a linguistic tool to analyze to corpora (or text collections) by building concordances, which again can be analyzed in terms of word frequency,… Continue Reading →
Sometimes it seems to me that software tester in general have a certain nag for linguistics and semantics in particular. Just have a look at all those testing Vs checking and DevOps articles (I’ll come back to the latter discussion later). Which is not overly surprising as semantics is about meaning, which on the other… Continue Reading →
I attended a meeting of the Software Test User Group Hamburg last week, which was an open discussion on how testing and the role of testers have changed in agile contexts. I won’t go into detail here on the “Quo vadis, QA?” part, but there was a statement during the discussion that I would like… Continue Reading →
Some time ago I talked to a product owner, who wondered that certain things had not been tested, although he had written all the information down, including a whole bunch of acceptance criteria. “And everything else that I have not written down is up to testers and developers to know anyway!” This felt like a… Continue Reading →
From time to time, mostly when discussing, you will hear someone say “This is just semantics!” implying that a group should get back to topic and not loose itself in details. I really hate that phrase! And let me tell you why. As I pointed out in my post on communication the content or meaning… Continue Reading →
I have been digging into BDD lately. There are some good readings on cucumber and jbhave (and probably a ton of other tools), giving examples and syntax descriptions of the different phrases and keywords used. I couldn’t really find a proper description focusing on gherkin in terms of how different phrases are aligned and supposed… Continue Reading →
Introduction This post is the third and last in a three part series about communication and natural language in the context of software testing and software development in general. This will be done taking the register approach the way Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad proposed it into account. I will not conduct a full-fledged register… Continue Reading →
Introduction This post is the second in a three part series about communication and natural language in the context of software testing and software development in general. This will be done taking the register approach the way Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad proposed it into account. I will not conduct a full-fledged register analysis, but… Continue Reading →
Introduction This post is the first in a three part series about communication and natural language in the context of software testing and software development in general. This will be done taking the register approach the way Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad proposed it into account. I will not conduct a full-fledged register analysis, but… Continue Reading →