Having trouble understanding why James Bach and I think it’s important to distinguish between checking and testing? Consider this: a pile of leaves is not a tree. Leaves are important parts of trees, but there’s a lot more to a tree than just its leaves. The leaves owe their existence to being part of a larger system of the tree. Nature makes sure that leaves drop off and are replaced … Read more
Some testers have got into the habit of saying that “we break the software”. That leads to psychological and political problems: “The product was fine until the testers broke it.” The software is what it is, either broken or not, when we get it. So, try saying “We look for problems that could threaten the value of the software.” As James Bach says, the only things we break are illusions.
It is not the job of testing to build confidence in the product. Confidence is a relationship between the product and some stakeholder. It is much more the job of testing to identify problems in the product—and in people’s perceptions of the product—that are based on or that would lead to unwarranted confidence.
When someone says “We don’t have time for testing”, try translating that into “We don’t have time to think critically about the product, to experiment with it, and to learn about ways in which it might fail.” Then ask if people feel okay about that.
Apropos of my post from the other day and the inconsistency with image oracle heuristic, have a look here. I actually encountered this dialog myself several years ago. As one person commenting on the blog post reports, this security message from Windows has a typo in it (“form”, where it should be “from”), which has the ironic effect of making a security warning look even more like malware than it … Read more
(I’ve changed a couple of details here to maintain confidentiality. On the other hand, I’ll bet something like this has happened where you work, too.) A while ago I was working with a tester at a client site, and I observed a problem: one word in a status message dialog box was misspelled. Due to a frozen severity classification system and (worse) to the kind of thinking that accompanies it, … Read more
Continuing from yesterday… As you may recall, my correspondent remarked “To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.” Here’s an example of the importance of semantics in testing. … Read more
Commenting on testing and checking, one correspondent responds: “To be honest, I don’t care what these types of verification are called be it automated checking or manual testing or ministry of John Cleese walks. What I would like to see is investment and respect being paid to testing as a profession rather than arguing with ourselves over semantics.” My very first job in software development was as a database programmer … Read more
Dale Emery, a colleague for whom we have great respect, submitted a comment on my last blog post, which in turn referred to Testing and Checking Refined on James Bach‘s blog. Dale says: I don’t see the link between your goals and your solution. Your solution seems to be (a) distinguishing what you call checking from what you call testing, (b) using the terms “checking” and “testing” to express the … Read more