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
Over the last few months, and especially during some face-to-face time that we had in England recently, James Bach and I have been working to sharpen our notions of testing and checking. Although the task had been on the list for some time, we didn’t get a sense of great urgency about it until we were surprised recently to find that, at a very subtle but important level, we meant … Read more
Another day has dawned on Planet Earth, so another tester has used LinkedIn to ask about the difference between severity and priority. The reason the tester is asking is, probably, that there’s a development project, and there’s probably a bug tracking system, and it probably contains fields for both severity and priority (and probably as numbers). The tester has probably been told to fill in each field as part of … Read more