N is for Never
A powerful heuristic for test ideas. For example, “a non-admin user should never be able to delete a customer record.”
What else can you come up with for “N is for […]”?
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- Non-Functional
- Null
Even though N is quite common, it’s quite hard to come up with testing related stuff lol!
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N is for Now.
We can often get caught up in things that might be important but what is important right now? Can we be hard on those decisions and pick something that truly matters?
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Non functional requirements 
No tests found 
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N is for Negative: Tests that verify the system correctly handles errors or negative scenarios. For example, “An incorrect username or password should not allow a user to log in.”
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NUMMI
A General Motors factory that Toyota took over managing. It had a terrible reputation before Toyota took it over and they changed it round to be a successful plant that produced quality cars. The plant went from worst to best. There are lots of lessons:
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The New Economics
book by W. Edwards Deming. This book includes the Red Beads Experiment, a System of Profound Knowledge and control charts. Some people say that this book contains the culmination of his lifes work.
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Network Conditions - as I experienced that myself when I was stranded in the Philippines with max 1,5MB of speed and a lot of my tests didn’t work anymore
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N is for NOT, the logical operator that negates a statement or conditional.
if(checking != testing) {
debate.start();
}
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N is for naughty strings.
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N is for Nightmare Headline Game, from Elizabeth Henderson’s book, Explore it!
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N is for NO… In Bold & Capital
When software is not ready for end-users it is the primary responsibility of the qa to make the stakeholders aware of the status of the software and clear their stand that they are not ready to give the sign-off for the deployment.
However, if the stakeholders still persuade the QA for deployment, then qa can choose for conditional sign-off in such cases.
Instead of taking risks and ruining the end-user’s experience with bugs, it is better to wait and later deploy the stable build.
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@simon_tomes “N is for Null”
This heuristic helps test scenarios where data is expected to be present but might not be. For example, “A user should never see an error when submitting a form with optional fields left empty” or “The system should handle null values gracefully without crashing.”
This approach ensures that your tests cover edge cases where data might be missing or undefined, strengthening the robustness of your application.
What are your thoughts on adding this to your testing strategy?
1 Like