I recently started writing on what will be my first book. The title was the thing that came to me first together with the idea of subject. Why do we test? That's the title, at this point, and my intention is to gather up my own experiences and the experiences that are shared with me by colleagues and other testers around me. My hope is that it will be of some value to someone and most of all I view it as a great opportunity for myself to become a better writer. Writing is a large part of what I do as a tester and test manager. Strategies, plans, reports of different kinds are sometime too large a part of my job. I enjoy it so I shouldn't complain and I take every chance I can to make these thing more useful and usable and as short as possible. I'm sure I'm not the only one who have experienced that large documents never get used, never get read. They tend to collect dust on whatever disk space they occupy.
Back to the main question: Why do we test? The obvious answer would be: To learn. That's a correct answer but it's hard to convey why we test and what the value of test is with that short reply. It needs to be followed up, and backed up, with the reasons and arguments behind it. It is also different things to different people and that is one of the major challenges when communicating the Why. More than once have I seen test have its allocated time cut down and even completely scrapped in projects. Many times it has been obvious that the decision maker(s) have a very different view of what test really is and what test really does. More than once it has been too late to change the decision when I've gotten a chance to try to enlighten them about what test is and what test brings to the table but now, collecting and writing this book, I will build a nice collection, for myself and others, with experiences and arguments concerning why we do test.
I'll get back to this topic more as my work on the book continues.
A special thanks you to Mike Sutton for helping get off my lazy behind and write a blog post! He is writing to, here.
Great idea - I'd love to contribute! My blog is http://g33klady.posterous.com
ReplyDeleteThe book sounds interesting, can you share any more details on it ?
ReplyDeleteWell "Unknown" Hilary :) I'll add you to my list of people to talk to and get input from! Thank you!
ReplyDeletePhil, thank you for your interest! I'll be publishing bits and pieces, stuff that'll work as blog posts, as I continue working on my writing.
ReplyDeleteHey Ola , very very valid question.
ReplyDeleteI suspect some of the answers may scare the dead. Regardless this big question of 'why' is critical. Thank you for inspiring deeper thinking on this and for helping me restart my blogging too. This was fun.
This actually sounds like a *really* interesting idea. I've read a number of texts now on testing in software, and almost universally the "why" seems to be left out. In my experience as a regular software dev when I write unit tests & such I always have difficulty knowing when enough is enough, or when I'm going past the point of testing too much. Having a clear answer in my head as to the "why we test" question would help to guide that (ex: is it to show that software meets a basic specification? Can handle completely invalid/unexpected input? etc)
ReplyDeleteThank you Mike, it was a very good way to get started again! Looking forward to seeing you post a bit more often now! I really liked your post and it was thought provoking to.
ReplyDeleteand Thank you Adam, It's a valid point you make that having a clear "Why" in your head will help you make good decisions when testing or, as i your case, when you write automation code for checking the software. I will make sure that I do my best to cover that aspect as well since I believe it's a very useful part of why we need to understand the "Why". Thank you for making that point.