Software Testing Blog

In the second part of our Testing the Limits with Anne-Marie Charrett, we get her thoughts on the meaning of exploratory testing, the challenge of agile adoption, how to grow as a tester and more. Enjoy!

uTest: Certain industries appear to be ahead of the curve when it comes to testing practices, while others remain in the proverbial stone age. Is this an accurate statement? Or have testing practices evolved at similar pace across all industries? As someone who has spent time in many sectors, we’re interested to hear your thoughts on this.

AMC: I think companies that demand value from their testing are generally more receptive to new ideas and change in testing. I don’t think it’s fair to silo this into industries.

Take for example the finance industry, yes many large insurance and bank corporations are risk averse and resist change but not all. For example Barclays Bank are using coaching & Rapid Software Testing.

I’ve worked with small companies in R&D who you would associate with flexibility and being pro-active, yet they want very traditional, heavily documented testing processes. Often this is because someone did testing ‘once’ and this is what they did.

I’ve seen testing practices change within sectors too. For example, the telco sector in the mid 1990‘s were typically heavily documentation orientated. Often testing went on for years before a product was released. By the late 90’s and early 2000’s testing practices had to evolve as smaller companies with lighter and more flexible delivery approaches challenged this paradigm.

uTest: There’s a good debate right now on the true meaning of exploratory testing, with people like James Bach and Michael Bolton chiming in with their opinions. What is your definition of exploratory testing? And in your view, what is the most misunderstood term in testing today?

AMC: So many questions!! The beauty of Exploratory Testing is that it can mean different things to different people. Thats why there are so many different perspectives on it.

There are some core values to Exploratory Testing, namely that it’s an approach (not a technique), it’s simultaneous learning, design and execution and that it’s tester centric.

The latter ideal is something that I cherish and hold dear.  I think it’s essential that we take responsibility for the testing we do. This means each tester decides on their testing approach, what they test and when they’re done. Owning these decisions is what matures a tester, helping them become skilled, confident and motivated to excel in their testing.

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To kick off another amzing year of Testing the Limits we reached out to Anne-Marie Charrett, an independent tester who has worked for the likes of Mercury Interactive, IBM (twice) and Nortel – just to name a few. She also arranges for speakers to visit Ireland as part of Softtest Ireland and blogs about her testing experience and offers coaching at mavericktester.com. 

In part I of this month’s interview, we learn what motivates Anne-Marie to coach via Skype, what’s caught her interest lately, how her book with James Bach is coming and what the biggest mis-conception about testing is. Come back tomorrow for part II.

uTest: In terms of writing, speaking and researching, you are one of the most active testers in the business. So we’ll start by asking you this: What hot topics within testing have captured your interest recently?

AMC: 2012 has kicked off with a flurry of activity. Key topics appear to be, How we learn, Rapid Test Management and more recently James Bach has been looking Exploratory Test Documentation.

It goes like this. Typically we write tests and charters as artifacts for other people as evidence of work performed. But writing is a lot more powerful than that, it has the ability to assist in design (think brainstorming in mind maps). Exploratory Test Documentation is about changing the purpose of writing from an end product to a by product.

I also like the way new conferences and peer workshops are happening at a grass roots level, for example Lets Test in Stockholm. These are not necessarily big conferences, but ones that offer value to testers and that encourage participation. I hope that this will be the conference circuit of the future!

uTest: You’ve made quite a name for yourself as a testing coach; offering advice to testers free of charge via Skype. In your experience, what areas require the most coaching on your part? In other words, what does a typical tester coaching session cover?

AMC: Often testers come looking for coaching in a particular skill (e.g Test Automation), but many fail to understand basic testing concepts such as: “What is testing?” and “How do you determine bugs?”

Understanding testing is key to improving your testing skill.  After all, if you don’t understand something, how can you improve it?

Software delivery typically doesn’t allow for this type of introspection. Our jobs demand we focus on delivery, often to the detriment of how well we are doing our testing.

Coaching is the breathing space that all testers need to learn and grow.

In coaching I encourage testers to work through tasks to acquire skill. I’m there to guide and help them, but they need to work out the answers. That way, their learning experience is deeper and more meaningful and empowering.

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In part II of our Testing the Limits interview with security expert Richard Stiennon, we get his thoughts on where companies are least prepared for a security breach; the explosion of mobile related threats; the future of cyber security and much more. If you missed the first installment, read Part I now.

uTest: What’s the one piece of security advice you would have for companies that are in their infancy?

RS: Plan ahead. As you grow so does your “target area.” When you launch your product or service you may not be in the cross hairs of a bad actor. But you will be. Sometimes security builds in “friction” that can slow down customer acquisition. So you may not want to require 12 character passwords and SMS authentication at the beginning but know that eventually you will have to deal with account theft, breaches, and spammers. Have a plan so you can implement defenses quickly; and ideally before a damaging attack or breach. You don’t want to be in the position of the Sony Play Station Network that implemented protections *after* a series of attacks that cost $170 million to recover form.

uTest: You’ve said before that mobile will not require its own anti-virus systems. That said, it seems that mobile threats are multiplying by the hour. In your view, what’s the biggest security challenge in terms of mobile?

RS: Apps, apps, apps. VPNs, firewalls, and carrier filtering are going to impede network based attacks. Containing and vetting applications is the biggest security challenge for the platform vendors.

uTest: Looking back to the 1990s, what’s surprised you the most about the evolution of cyber security? What’s been your biggest disappointment?

RS: For me the biggest surprise was the confluence of existing criminal organizations and cyber crime, especially arising out of the demise of the Soviet Union. In retrospect is seems obvious, but at the time it was a wake-up call for me that guys with guns and baseball bats were going high-tech. My biggest disappointment is that security has never become important enough to spawn secure networks or secure computers. Not a single ISP or carrier has gone to market with a secure network with complete content inspection. Not a single computer manufacturer outside the military has sold a computer whose primary feature is security. They are all happy to sell you security add-ons but not willing to step up and address the underlying vulnerability of their products.

uTest: What happens in the next decade of security is anyone’s guess, but your predictions carry a bit more weight. Care to make any bold predictions on the future of cyber security? The bolder, the better.

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What an honor it is to have security expert Richard Stiennon cap off another great year of Testing the Limits. Aside from being the most followed IT security analyst on Twitter, Richard is an accomplished writer, having authored Surviving Cyberwar and the soon to be published Cyber Defense: Countering Targeted Attacks. Richard is currently Chief Research Analyst of IT-Harvest, a security analyst firm with a wide range of high-profile clients. For more on his background, click here.

In part I of our interview, we get his thoughts on the difference between security and other types of testing; what the world would look like under full blown cyber war; the biggest threats to the typical web user; the motives of hackers and more. Tune in tomorrow for part II.

uTest: You started out in the field of aerospace as an engineer and wound up as one of the world’s top security experts (so typical). Kidding aside, what attracted you to the field of cyber security? And what’s kept you there for the better part of two decades?

Richard Stiennon: My transition from structural engineer to networking came when I started a dial-up ISP in Michigan, but I did not get the security bug until joining Netrex, which was an integrator of security products and services. Through Netrex I worked with a lot of the early security products and the founders of ISS, and Check Point Software. By the time Netrex was acquired by ISS (later to be acquired by IBM) I had moved on to PwC where I got exposed to large enterprise and performed audits on their security postures. From there it was on to Gartner and after that I was firmly entrenched in the IT security world. I have a low threshold for boredom. The security industry moves so fast you get left behind if you allow your eyes to glaze over for a second.

uTest: Is it fair to say that security testing requires a much different mindset/persona than other types of testing? If so, what specific qualities and characteristics are needed in a security tester? If you were assembling a team of security testers, what traits would you look for?

RS: Security testing of software throughout its development cycle is indeed different than quality and functionality testing. Instead of testing against end user use cases you have to have a mind set of an attacker, a completely different use case. In addition to meticulous use of security testing tools (HP-Fortify, Veracode, etc) a security tester must understand the application and how an attacker would leverage built-in functionality to subvert a system. A security tester must be diligent and detail oriented as well as imaginative and wily – a rare combination.

uTest: In 2010, you published Surviving Cyber War, which gave the world an inside look into the onset of state-sponsored cyber war. Since then, there’s been no shortage of similar incidents (Stuxnet, Anonymous, to name a few). Are you surprised at the speed in which cyber warfare is evolving?

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In part II of our Testing the Limits interview with Noah Sussman, we ask him some questions on Etsy’s testing challenges; assembling a testing team; localization testing and more. Did you miss part I? You can catch up here.

uTest: Total job interview question: What’s been the biggest testing challenge at Etsy and how have you been able to overcome it?

NS: Total job interview answer: concurrency has been a big challenge for us as we scaled our CI cluster. Most xUnit test runners aren’t designed to deliver massive concurrency out of the box. Eg if you want to run all your PHPUnit tests concurrently, you have to build a special branch of the test runner.

And even then, most tests are not written with concurrency in mind either. So a lot of design, debugging and rewriting of legacy code have been required in order to get to a point where we could run our tests in as concurrent a fashion as the available hardware would allow.

uTest: A previous interview guest once wrote a lengthy post on the “victims of fake agile.” In your view, is there a danger of a half-assed move into the agile methodology? If so, what are some of the major consequences?

NS: I can only speak from personal experience and I don’t know how typical my experiences are. I agree with the author of that post in that adopting Agile won’t fix a dysfunctional team, and it won’t help an organization to learn to accept its limitations and work within them.

uTest: What types of traits/qualities/skills does Etsy look for when hiring testers?

NS: On my team there are two roles for which I hire. These aren’t formal roles and we switch them up sometimes.

I hire software engineers who value quality and who are interested in how complex systems fail. These are the people who customize our mocks and fixtures, manage our coding standards, build static analysis tools, develop Jenkins plugins, design the CI system in general other things of that nature.

Then there is another equally important set of people whose skillset is generally described as “hardcore QA chops and a deep connection to the Etsy community.” The people I’ve hired here have many years of formal QA experience in high-risk industries like finance. These are people who are willing to use what they know about formal process, to help Etsy avoid the need for formal processes.

Here I look for talented QA analysts who are longtime Etsy users and deeply involved in the Etsy community. These are the people who develop functional testing tools, manage Selenium integration with CI and work with others in the organization to formulate test plans and resolve bugs. They also design and improve the process by which we triage bugs found in production.

uTest: How does Etsy – which has a global user base – deal with testing issues related to localization?

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Our Testing the Limits guest this month is Noah Sussman, test architect at Etsy. If you recall, we chatted with Noah last month as part of our STPCon video interview series, which you can watch here. Noah’s professional background includes a stint at Barnes & Noble, where he was the Tools and Automation Specialist, in addition to being a technical adviser to several startups and organizations. To learn more about Noah, you can follow him on Twitter, or check out his posts on github or Quora.

In part one of our interview with Noah, we get his thoughts on how Etsy tests software; why engineers should take more responsibility for testing their code; testing at startups and much more.

uTest: When it comes to testing, there’s certainly no shortage of collective knowledge to draw from. Who are some of your software testing role models – in terms of both companies and individuals – that you strive to emulate?

NS: As far as people, I work with a great team at Etsy. I feel really lucky to work with this many talented and knowledgeable people. Check out our engineering blog, http://codeascraft.etsy.com, as well as http://github.com/Etsy. You’ll find a large number of people with a wide range of ideas, all of which I believe are interesting. Once you’ve read their blog posts on Code As Craft, you should check out their personal blogs too, because those are fascinating as well.

Sebastian Bergmann and Jason Huggins have also been very helpful to me as I tried to figure out the best way to make CI work with Etsy’s unique deployment process.

As to companies, Blizzard, Amazon.com and Facebook all are using the Internet to build new kinds of communities and businesses. All three are essentially collections of Web services. But they’re able to manage their enormous communities and are constantly adding new features that their users pretty much love.

uTest: You’re an established figure in the testing space now, but you’ve spent much of your career on the development side of things. What (if any) were some of the biggest challenges you faced transitioning from dev to testing? And conversely, what advantages has your prior dev experience given you in your testing career?

NS: When I began making Web sites in 1999, I manually tested each site I built. Sometimes I worked with a QA team and sometimes not, but I have always checked my own work before delivering it, regardless.

As the Web grew, my projects got more complex. Tasks like making sure there were no broken links on a site quickly became infeasible to do manually. Soon even manually viewing every page on a site became unworkable as well.

So I learned some Perl and suddenly I could do static analysis. Then I learned to parse and alert on the output from tools like HTMLTidy, the W3 CSS Validator and later JSLint. After that, the number of bugs in my code dropped dramatically.

At first most people thought I was a little nuts for taking this approach. In 2001 almost no one cared if a site was robust. Web sites were cheap, throwaway things — “brochureware.” But a few years later along came Google Maps and GMail and now Web sites were first-class applications, expected to perform well and last a long time.

After that I just found myself more and more involved in helping teams produce quality Web sites. I think once everyone realized testing Web sites was important, I just naturally got drawn into that because I was interested in the domain. There aren’t a whole lot of Web developers who are really deeply passionate about testing. Or if there are, I haven’t met most of them yet!

uTest: What’s the biggest difference between testing at a startup versus testing at a larger company like Etsy?

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In Part II of our Testing the Limits interview with Michael Bolton, we get his opinions on the corporate fear of Rapid Software Testing; the challenges of coaching testers; the similarities between testing and sex; why programmers should learn to test; writing about testing; negotiating with the other Michael Bolton and more. Did you miss Part I? Then you can find it here.

uTest: It seems that your primary audience is fairly open the principles of RST. But for those who aren’t, what are their main objections? Have the skeptics made you rethink or refine any aspect of RST?

MB: The primary objection appears to be that people are reluctant to give up their safety blankets. They’re frightened of reducing bureaucracy and paperwork, because those things appear to make testing work more legible.  But that’s an illusion:  bureaucracy and paperwork make illusions about testing work more legible. (Have a look at James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State for a wonderful description of legibility and how the neo-Platonists and the high modernists get it wrong for everyone except—sometimes–for themselves.)  People seem frightened to invest in skill, because even though skillful work can be very well documented, it doesn’t necessarily leave a familiar kind of paper trail.

People seem frightened of telling a different kind of testing story in a different way, because managers have become used to a certain kind of test reporting.  I think most companies are frightened of finding out what’s really going on in a product or a project, because the truth would be pretty horrifying in a lot of cases.  People are frightened of acknowledging the role of skill and tacit knowledge in technical work, because they’re frightened of having to replace people who leave. The assumption there is that the new hire only learns through documentation, but that’s clearly false; we learn through social interactions, by interaction with our products, and by doing meaningful work for which we’re held responsible.

One more thing:  many people whose jobs are titled “quality assurance” seem unwilling to give up their perception of their own authority. People want to be “influential”, to “own quality”, to “be the gatekeeper”, to “speak for the customer”.  I don’t have authority over the project unless I’m the project manager.  As a tester, I don’t have that authority, nor can I claim to speak for the customer more credibly than anyone else. I’ve met testers who believe that it’s their prerogative to tell programmers what to do or how to do it.  I recommend that such testers reflect on how they feel when they’re told what to do by people who’ve never done testing work.

As for what we’ve done to rethink or refine things, that’s a continuous process. James and I are currently working on a few important threads. I learned a great lesson from Jerry Weinberg in his Problem Solving Leadership workshop a few years back.  Someone accounted for a less-than-successful attempt at problem solving by saying “The complexity of the problem screwed us up.”  Jerry peered over the top of his glasses and replied, “Your reaction to the complexity of the problem screwed you up.”  So in the delivery of the class, we’re trying to focus on helping testers to see the simplicity behind complex situations, so the testers can be more confident in their ability to deal with them. On the other hand, we’re also focusing on helping testers to see the complexity behind apparently simple situations, so the testers have the wariness that they need to avoid being fooled too easily.  We’re also working on showing how to use Rapid Testing approaches in highly formalized or highly regulated environments, pointing to our experiences in financial and medical contexts. Excellent format testing (which is often confirmatory or demonstrative) begins with excellent informal testing. Consistent with that, we’re trying to make people aware that the bulk of their work is exploratory in nature, even though they might not have noticed it.  “Formal testing”, which often takes the form of dog-and-pony shows for regulators or auditors, is one thing. Testing to make sure that people don’t die or lose a fortune or pile on some horrible risk is another thing. Excellent testing of the former kind of testing depends on excellent testing of the latter kind.

uTest: If the Context-Driven School of Testing were a traditional school, there’d be a lot of students on the waiting list. In other words, the community is growing rapidly every day. What’s surprised you the most about the emergence of the Context-Driven community thus far?

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Our Testing the Limits “reunion tour” rolls on this month with Michael Bolton, back for another lively session of Q&A. Michael is best known as the founder of DevelopSense, his Toronto-based testing consulting firm, and as a leading figure in Rapid Testing and the Context-Driven school of testing. In short, he’s one of the industry’s most highly regarded writers, speakers and teachers – and it’s a real pleasure to have him back. For more on Michael, be sure to check out his website, blog or follow him on Twitter.

In part I of our healthy two-part interview, we get his thoughts on test cases not being related to testing; the sub-par debate skills of testers; the quality chain of command; objections to Rapid Testing and much more. Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part II. Enjoy!

uTest: It’s been almost two years since our last interview. Where does the time go? We’ve followed you pretty closely during that time (on Twitter, don’t worry), but for those who haven’t, what have they missed? New publications? New courses? New ideas on testing? What’s new with Michael Bolton?

MB: I’ve been traveling like crazy this year, and I’m booked pretty heavily through the end of the year.  I’m beginning to set up my schedule for next year—so if people would like to schedule an in-house class, now is a great time to ask.  For new publications How to Reduce the Cost of Testing, a new book edited by Matt Heusser and Govind Kulkarni, has just been released. I’m pleased to say that I’ve got a chapter in there, with a number of other members of our community.

I don’t specialize in new ideas in testing so much, but rather in refining and reframing ideas we’ve had for years in more specific and, I hope, more useful ways. The other thing that I love to do is to bring ideas from elsewhere into testing.  Currently I’m fascinated by the work of Harry Collins, who studies the sociology of science and the ways in which people develop knowledge and skill. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is his most recent book; The Shape of Actions is older.  I’m most interested in the idea of repair, which is Collins’ notion for the ways in which people fix up information as they prepare to send it, or as they receive and interpret it.

As an example, I’m 5’ 8” tall.  If I ask you how tall I am in centimeters (and provide you with the ratio of 2.54 centimeters to the inch), you’ll probably do a little math in your head to translate 5’ 8” into 68 inches.  If you do that, it’s because you have tacit knowledge that a foot is 12 inches, and it’s quicker to do five times 12 in your head and add eight than to work it out on the calculator.  Then you’ll report that I’m 173 centimeters (or 172), rather than what the calculator tells you:  172.72.  If you round the answer up or down to a whole centimeter, it’s because you have tacit knowledge that the extra precision is useless when my height changes more than that with every breath. The calculator doesn’t know that, but people often fix up the interaction with the tool, applying that kind of tacit knowledge without noticing that they’re doing it.  Collins argues that we give calculators and computers and machines more credit than they deserve when we ascribe intelligence or knowledge to them, even when we do it casually or informally.

My latest hobby horse is definitely not new, but I’d like to have a go at it anyway.  I’d like to skewer the idea of the test case having any serious relationship to testing.  Test cases are typically examples of what the product should do. That’s important; we often need examples to help explicate requirements and desires. But examples are not tests, so I’d like to call those artifacts example cases or examples rather than test cases. They’re confirmatory, not exploratory; checks, not tests. Brian Marick has written a lot about examples; Matt Heusser has too; so has Gojko Adzic. James Bach has been railing about test cases for a long time.  Often test cases are overly elaborate, expensive to prepare and maintain.  They’d be even more expensive if testers didn’t repair them on the fly, inserting subtle variations making observations that the test case doesn’t specify.  Just as Collins suggests about machines, test cases get more credit than they deserve.  As Pradeep Soundarajan would say, the test case doesn’t find the bug.  The tester finds the bug, and the test case has a role in that.  Now: the development of checks and the interpretation of checks—those things require all kinds of sapience and skill.

A test, to me, is an investigation, not a bit of input and output for a function.  Yet people tend to think of testing in terms of test cases.  Even worse, people count test cases; and even worse than that, they count passing and failing test cases to measure the completeness of project work or testing work.  It’s like evaluating the quality of a newspaper by counting the number of stories in it without reference to the content, the quality of the writing, the quality of the investigation, the relevance of the report, whether a given article contains one story or a dozen, and so forth.  Counting stories would be a ludicrous way of measuring either the quality of the newspaper or the state of the world. Yet, it seems to me, many development and testing organizations try to observe and evaluate testing in this completely shallow and ridiculous way. They do that because seem to think about things in terms of units of production. Learning, discoveries, threats to value, management responses… none of these things are widgets. They not things, either, for that matter.

uTest: In a recent blog post, you wrote about the inability of some testers to properly frame tests, mainly because they haven’t been asked to. Generally speaking, what other qualities or skills do you find testers to be lacking in?

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In part II of our latest Testing the Limits interview with James Bach, we discuss what it would take to get him back on the client side of testing; free testing tools that he’s currently using; required reading for new testers; his upcoming speaking/book tour, sniper rifling in Middle Earth and more. Enjoy!

If you missed part I, you can find it here.

uTest: Your brother recently made the leap to the client side at eBay….will we see James Bach cross back over as well?

JB: Well, maybe a super-villain out there buys out my company and hires me full time to be chief tester for their front corporation. I would wonder at first why I was being paid three million dollars a year to test a variation of Angry Birds, but the money would blunt my natural inquisitiveness (I have my wife’s medical bills to pay, after all).

Only after a British secret agent drops in (literally) at my office to confront me with the horrible truth (that the program I was testing was actually a doomsday device) would I and Cortana (an AI construct rendered as a perky young female that switched sides after spontaneously evolving a sense of ethics) manage to skillfully mis-report critical bugs prior to sign-off. This would lead to the destruction of the doomsday machine seconds after our daring escape through the test data exhaust port.

But I doubt that will happen.

Basically, it would take an unreasonable amount of money to make me give up my independence.

uTest: You wrote a great blog post recently on the subject of tool vendors – specifically, how they can avoid your wrath. We’ve also heard you recommend free tools in the past (“because they can be freely abandoned”). What tools (either paid or free) have you discovered recently and how have hey helped your testing efforts?

JB: I’ve been playing with “R”. It’s a free statistical analysis system.

There are several books on it. I love tools that help me work with complicated data.

The tool that has helped me most recently is my Canon solid state video recorder combined with my micro tripod. I think I will never do professional testing again without a camera rolling. It’s so helpful to be able to roll back the film and watch what I just did in order to reproduce a difficult problem.

uTest: You’ve been following the testing of medical devices rather closely, recently highlighting that the FDA had come to recognize the value of exploratory testing. Are there other particular industries that need to make this same realization? If so, which ones?

JB: Banking, insurance, and aerospace come to mind. I’m working with a major world bank as well as a major insurance company right now, so that feels good. They are both “standardizing” on Rapid Testing. Which means that thinking for one’s self is becoming their standard.

uTest: We know you’re not much of a proponent of testing textbooks, but we know you’re a big fan of books and literature in general. Do you have a “required reading” list for new testers? If so, what are some of titles we could expect to find on it?

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Back for another session on the Testing the Limits hot seat is James Bach – one of our most popular guests and one of the most widely recognized figures in testing today. A prolific author, speaker, coach and consultant, James has been disrupting the testing industry since 1987. For more on James’ background, his body of work and his testing philosophy in general, you can check out his blog, website or follow him on Twitter.

In part one of our latest interview, we get his thoughts on his previous life as a developer; how testers should interact with engineers; the biggest waste of time in testing today; the skills that most testers lack and more.

uTest: In a recent lecture you said that you hated being a developer, saying it was like completing 25 crossword puzzles every day (i.e. boring and repetitive). What’s the one piece of advice you would offer to those are who are thinking of making the transition from dev to testing?

JB: I advise: make that transition– but please, study testing as you do.

Testing is not just another programming problem. Yet, too often, a programmer mentality sees testing as just the process of manipulating software. Sometimes, programmers dream of robot armies to do their “testing.” The quest for the clever tool then eclipses the mission of excellent testing. This is a little like trying to invent an android that can talk to your wife so that you don’t have to.

You can use all your tech skills, programmers. It’s fine to write software. But what testing is really about is rapid, deep learning. To do that, you have to get your face, and all the rest of you, right up close to that product. You must wrestle with the product– yes– by hand. Or as we like to say where I come from: you need to do your testing sapiently.

uTest: In that same presentation you also talked about the importance of making friends with developers. Why is the tester-developer relationship so adversarial at times?

JB: I don’t know, why does my wife not like it when I report defects in her? People are strange that way…

Seriously, it’s easy to see the dynamic. Anyone who creates a piece of work and submits it for judgment is going to feel judged. That’s not a pleasant feeling. And the problem is compounded by testers who glibly declare that this or that little nit or nat is a “defect,” as if anything they personally don’t like is a quality problem for everybody. It is further compounded when programmers and testers are separated by large distances or other communication barriers, not to mention the process barriers.

Even though technical people are renowned and sought after for their social skills (I understand United Nations programmers were just about to solve the Arab-Israeli situation a few months ago, had it not been for the need to calm tensions between the Koreas.) testers and developers are people who see the world very differently. It’s a special challenge to relax and smile when a bug report seems to have been ignored.

Personally, I make a set of explicit commitments to any developer I work with on a project. I write them down and deliver them. This seems to help.

uTest: You’ve said many times that belief is a sin for testers – something we assume you’ve learned from experience. Was there anything in particular that led you to this truism? Or was it just years of experience?

JB: It’s not a matter of experience, but reason. Our job is vigilance. To lose vigilance is to abdicate our responsibility. Vigilance, in testing, means being a good skeptic. We must reject certainty in any form. We’re the Knights of May Be. To believe is to cease questioning; to fall asleep at our posts.

I use lots of information. I work hard not to believe it. This is my discipline.

uTest: What’s the biggest waste of time in testing today?

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