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in reply to The purpose of testing

++ g0n!

I am a Quality Assurance professional and I totally agree with you that testing is not about filling out defect reports but about finding bugs before they hit production. It is not only embarrassing to the development team but the QA team as well. That is why I like to create test cases from the very first draft of the specification. I think that QA should happen as the BA is writing the spec. Testing for logic as well as design before it even hits development would make unit testing a lot easier.

QA People at your place of work may be non-technical but I dont' think this is the norm. I QA by profession but I code in my personal time. I think this helps me to write better test cases because I think as a developer not as a "non-technical" QA person.

I have used Test::More to automate some tests before but I like manual testing. It allows me to get personal with the code and the application i'm testing. Automated testing is very impersonal and quick like a one-night stand :-). I like to get to know the application i'm testing even before I can see it.

Very nice meditation!

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Re^2: The purpose of testing
by AgileTester (Initiate) on Oct 16, 2006 at 22:51 UTC
    I wish everyone would get out of the bad habit of referring to testers and test teams as 'QA'. Generally, we are doing testing. We might be doing quality control. Quality assurance is a whole different animal. Evidently at some point, someone decided the words 'test team' or 'tester' don't sound important enough. I'm proud to be a tester (although ashamed of some in my profession, such as the team described in this post). I work on a team where everyone including the programmers shares responsibility for quality, testing and test automation. We're very happy with the results. As for test teams needing to be 'independent', that's silly. A good tester provides information about the application. It doesn't matter who we report to. We aren't going to be somehow insidiously influenced to not find issues because we have a collaborative relationship with the programmers. More communication and collaboration would go a long way with most projects.
[reply]
      For the record, when I said QA, I meant QA, in the project management sense of the term. In our environment we don't have a separate testing function, developers test each others code (but never their own). QA should absolutely be independent, to ensure that political expendiency cannot override fundamental quality standards. On a different project I worked on (for a different organisation) without an independent quality function, testing could be (and frequently was) almost entirely dispensed with by management edict in order to meet a deadline. The result was disastrous, except for the project manager who was only judged on meeting the deadline, not the quality of the final deliverables. An independent quality function is there to ensure such ill advised deviations from procedure don't happen.

      --------------------------------------------------------------

      "If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing."
      John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider".

[reply]
      As for test teams needing to be 'independent', that's silly. A good tester provides information about the application. It doesn't matter who we report to. We aren't going to be somehow insidiously influenced to not find issues because we have a collaborative relationship with the programmers. More communication and collaboration would go a long way with most projects.

      ++

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