So I was recently reading this blog post, and it raised some interesting thought processes.
I'd never really thought of testing being dead as it states in that article, instead I tend to think of it as evolving, evolving from having a myriad of test cases that need to be run as part of regression, or even as part of acceptance testing, to instead a more flexible approach.
I recently worked on a project, which had a massive constraint on time, effectively the business wanted it released to the customer as soon as possible, and it was a high priority project too. This meant that I could go about testing it in a different way to how I would have previously.
Instead of writing an abundance of acceptance tests for any features, I'd write GWTs or even perform exploratory testing (documented of course - a pet hate is exploratory testing that isn't really documented, see my blog post here). The biggest drawback to this "release it as quick as possible" approach was that it left no time for automation, but I could live with that, as it offered freedom in other ways.
You could argue that testing is once again getting squeezed, however, it's not necessarily a bad thing, as in having such strict deadlines it meant we tested smarter and more efficiently than we would have otherwise. We also identified gaps and risks early and ensured that they were covered by testing.
Another nice touch was that it was launched internally for a week, so that any issues that were identified were fixed when we released it officially a week later, so a form of beta testing/uat testing, that all too often, in my company at least, gets missed off.
In this instance, QA helped deliver effective and useful software to the end user, by changing our methods accordingly and evolving and offering advice on gaps and risk analysis.
So (as I commented on the article), testing isn't dead, it is just evolving, and will continue to evolve to adapt to ever changing requirements and demands that are placed on QA.
How is it evolving?
Well, besides how I mentioned above, there is more attention being paid to automation, QA are getting their hands dirty in writing automated test scripts and becoming more engaged with developers. We truly are getting to a stage where we have cross functional teams, there doesn't seem to be as much of a divide between what a Developer does and what a QA does, we are all engineers helping to deliver software that is valuable to the end user.
I'd never really thought of testing being dead as it states in that article, instead I tend to think of it as evolving, evolving from having a myriad of test cases that need to be run as part of regression, or even as part of acceptance testing, to instead a more flexible approach.
I recently worked on a project, which had a massive constraint on time, effectively the business wanted it released to the customer as soon as possible, and it was a high priority project too. This meant that I could go about testing it in a different way to how I would have previously.
Instead of writing an abundance of acceptance tests for any features, I'd write GWTs or even perform exploratory testing (documented of course - a pet hate is exploratory testing that isn't really documented, see my blog post here). The biggest drawback to this "release it as quick as possible" approach was that it left no time for automation, but I could live with that, as it offered freedom in other ways.
You could argue that testing is once again getting squeezed, however, it's not necessarily a bad thing, as in having such strict deadlines it meant we tested smarter and more efficiently than we would have otherwise. We also identified gaps and risks early and ensured that they were covered by testing.
Another nice touch was that it was launched internally for a week, so that any issues that were identified were fixed when we released it officially a week later, so a form of beta testing/uat testing, that all too often, in my company at least, gets missed off.
In this instance, QA helped deliver effective and useful software to the end user, by changing our methods accordingly and evolving and offering advice on gaps and risk analysis.
So (as I commented on the article), testing isn't dead, it is just evolving, and will continue to evolve to adapt to ever changing requirements and demands that are placed on QA.
How is it evolving?
Well, besides how I mentioned above, there is more attention being paid to automation, QA are getting their hands dirty in writing automated test scripts and becoming more engaged with developers. We truly are getting to a stage where we have cross functional teams, there doesn't seem to be as much of a divide between what a Developer does and what a QA does, we are all engineers helping to deliver software that is valuable to the end user.
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