This wasn’t tested properly

Have you ever heard of this comment before? How did it make you feel as a tester? My initial gut feeling in the past has been — “ouch! That hurts!”. I heard this very recently and still had that gut feeling, however, my critical questioning started to kick in.

What if they are right? It is bad testing? How would you know if it is bad testing? What would be the causes of this and what would you do to address it?

I have seen countless things online where it has felt like testing has been defended to the last breath without actually thinking, is there something in the feedback that the testing could be improved here? This is what I want to tackle. These difficult inner thoughts where we question — What if there is something in this feedback?

Twitter did not disappoint when I shared my thoughts — See this tweet https://twitter.com/fishouthebox/status/1554729681131274242?s=20&t=Y3iGpGBtJRi0A6Bu-btNAw

In short, the answer is, yes there is bad testing. It does depend a bit on the context as bad testing can look like all sorts of things. There were a lot of responses, however, I’ll give a brief overview of a few points that stuck out to me.

Some examples of bad testing given to me -

• Bad testing might involve no deep thought or investigation.
• Bad testing might involve focusing on things that do not matter the most (irrelevant risk)
• Bad testing might involve poor planning or discussions around testing.
• Bad testing might involve people that are not motivated.

Causes of bad testing

• Testing is poorly understood.
• Not enough supervision of testers who need it.
• We have not defined what proper testing looks like with the team and customer.
• Not enough time, domain knowledge or experience.

So what do we do about it?

• Educate others on accepting that there are always unknown risks.
• Train those doing the testing and those managing testing on what good testing looks like.
• Define what proper testing looks like.