Deeper Testing (1): Verify and Challenge

What does it mean to do deeper testing? In Rapid Software Testing, James Bach and I say:

Testing is deep to the degree that it has a probability of finding rare, subtle, or hidden problems that matter.

Deep testing requires substantial skill, effort, preparation, time, or tooling, and reliably and comprehensively fulfills its mission.

By contrast, shallow testing does not require much skill, effort, preparation, time, or tooling, and cannot reliably and comprehensively fulfill its mission.

(update, 2021-09-20: We’ve refined things a little. We now say

Shallow testing has a chance of finding every easy bug.

Deep testing maximizes the change of finding every elusive bug that matters.

What deep and shallow testing require remains the same. However, both can fulfill their missions, because their missions are different. Shallow testing may have the mission to find easy bugs quickly; to make the product more testable by identifying distracting bugs; to prepare testers for deeper testing; to check output without disrupting developers’ flow;… All of these missions are achievable with shallow testing. We’ve refined our talk about this because…)

Expressing ourselves precisely is a skill. Choosing and using words more carefully can sharpen the ways we think about things. In the next few posts, I’m going to offer some alternative ways of expressing the ideas we have, or interpreting the assignments we’ve been given. My goal is to provide some quick ways to achieve deeper, more powerful testing.

Many testers tell me that their role is to verify that the application does something specific. When we’re asked to that, it can be easy to fall asleep. We set things up, we walk through a procedure, we look for a specific output, and we see what we anticipated. Huzzah! The product works!

Yet that’s not exactly testing the product. It can easily slip into something little more than a demonstration—the kinds of things that you see in a product pitch or a TV commercial. The demonstration shows that the product can work, once, in some kind of controlled circumstance. To the degree that it’s testing, it’s pretty shallow testing. The product seems to work; that is, it appears to meet some requirement to some degree.

If you want bugs to survive, don’t look too hard for them! Show that the product can work. Don’t push it! Verify that you can get a correct result from a prescribed procedure. Don’t try to make the product expose its problems.

But if you want to discover the bugs, present a challenge to the product. Give it data at the extremes of what it should be able to handle, just a little beyond, and well beyond. Stress the product out; overfeed it, or starve it of something that it needs. See what happens when you give the product data that it should reject. Make it do things more complex than the “verification” instructions suggest. Configure the product (or misconfigure it) in a variety of ways to learn how it responds. Violate an explicitly stated requirement. Rename or delete a necessary file, and observe whether the system notices. Leave data out of mandatory fields. Repeat things that should only happen once. Start a process and then interrupt it. Imagine how someone might accidentally or maliciously misuse the product, and then act on that idea. While you’re at it, challenge your own models and ideas about the product and about how to test it.

We can never prove by experiment—by testing—that we’ve got a good product; when the product stands up to the challenge, we can only say that it’s not known to be bad. To test a product in any kind of serious way is to probe the extents and limits of what it can do; to expose it to variation; to perform experiments to show that the product can’t do something—or will do something that we didn’t want it to do. When the product doesn’t meet our challenges, we reveal problems, which is the first step towards getting them fixed.

So whenever you see, or hear, or write, or think “verify”, try replacing it with “challenge“.