Why do we test at all?
At the moment I am crowd sourcing ideas from the software testing community on what the Software Testing Principles 101 could be. If you are interested in getting involved, then you can message me on Twitter @fishouthebox or you can add a comment under the LinkedIn post. Thanks to each person that has made a contribution, so far.
As part of this discovery I have this question I want to answer, Why do we test at all? I see mentions of risk based testing and anything that threatens the value of a product, which may be true, however, what does that mean in plain language for anyone to understand. I’m going to do this exercise in this blog post where I fill out answers to the statement —
“I test to discover…” ….. What exactly..?
- If this meets the goals of who we’re building for (Users of the product).
- Potential frustrations to stakeholders……Users of the product, support engineers, sales staff, account managers, developers, product owners, UX, designers. etc
- If the product is free from danger or threat (security). You could map out the dangers, such as someone stealing your personal data or pretending to be you in the system.
- If the product is easy to use (usability) or whether anyone can use it (accessibility).
- If the product is speedy and responsive (performance).
- If I can test the product at all (testability). An example could be that a test environment is not the same as the production environment. It could be the way they are set up (configuration) or the test environment is not built in a way that it can manage volumes of users or data.
- What tools I can use to support my testing.
- Finding out the unknowns. By that I mean, thinking outside the box and trying something that is unexpected. Perhaps that is clicking a submit button more than once. Once would be expected, but twice would be unusual. Perhaps by clicking twice you have submitted it two times.
- What the creator of the software may be blind to. By this I mean the creator of the software is not the one who tests it. Those who create it will be blind to it’s flaws, so a second pair of eyes is needed.
These are the thoughts that I have come up with on the fly. There may be more!
I invite you to do this workshop with your team. Answer the question, why do we test? The answers needs to be in plain language for anyone to understand. This will help you create a shared understanding of why you test at all.
