Stories from a Software Tester

Astronomers have been finding lots of planets around other stars, which have come to collectively be called exoplanets. And, as part of that endeavor, they also try to think about finding life on those planets. There’s lots of corollaries here in terms of thinking about testing.

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Years ago I asked about what makes testing complicated. At that time I didn’t really have a very distinct nuance between “complex” and “complicated.” But I think my instinct was accurate. So here I want to focus on what makes testing complex (which is often inevitable) and that can help frame what makes testing complicated (which is not inevitable).

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I’ve often talked about the idea of tests putting pressure on design. I’ve also talked about this idea in the context of code-based testing. Here I want to revisit those concepts while including a cautionary tale about how testing at the code level has its own interesting challenges.

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Thankfully most testers that I come across do realize that the notion of having “zero defects” is, in fact, a fallacy. But this notion of something being “defect free” still persists in the wider industry. And it’s important to quash that perception. How I frame this when encountering the thought differs a bit. So here I’ll give a brief overview of various ways I respond.

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My original title for this post was “Thinking Clearly About Automation” but I realized there was a wider ambit to that discussion. We have a technocracy that likes to turn testing into a programming problem, suggesting that “manual testing” (testing done by humans) should be automated away as much as possible. That’s a danger. Some testers have combated this by suggesting automation has nothing to do with testing. I believe that’s also a danger.

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We often say testers have to “think like an architect” or “think like a builder” or, perhaps even, “think like a developer.” Here’s the problem: to actually think like any one of these people, you have to try to do something they do. So, really, you have to act like a developer. Let’s talk about this and where the testing relevance comes in.

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Here I’m going to write one of my posts that I think are the most fun but are probably the ones that many testers struggle with in terms of seeing how (or even whether) I’m being relevant. I want to talk a little about an aspect of testing that I think is consistently underused and consistently undersold in the industry: recovering a context that has been buried under years of major and minor decisions.

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