Patterns in weakness in approaches about testing

I was reading this testing round table discussion and thought this might a blog post. Here I go...

To me, the biggest weakness is the perception or idea about what testing is  and why it is required.

Here are few examples as how companies treat testing.

1. Something that is avoidable to large extent or even can be eliminated if they could get their programmers and analysts get spec and code exactly right. The lousy work that these folks do during SDLC - creates need for testing.

2. Quality Assurance - Straight out of the box comparison with manufacturing assembly line. For these folks, testing is all about process and nothing else. If you get process right - you are done. It does not make any difference who does and when - all they need is to get process script right.

3. Building quality from the grounds up - A variation of #1 above - a growing group of people think that if you have automated tests (checks - actually) you don't have to really worry about testing. You are building quality from the ground - you cannot test quality but need to build it right? poor testers will not define and manage testing (under the name QA)

4. Testing? What? The whole team approach. This is creation of Agile model. Here, testing is everyone's responsibility. There goes "testing" out of the door as a specialist's job. When testing is something anyone in the team does - it is like any other project task.

5. Dont forget - this popular rhetoric - Testing (phase) is dead - That is biggest weakness in approaches about testing.  What else can be the biggest weakness about something other than saying it is dead?


Whole idea of testing is dead is around these beliefs and notions (test yourself if you agree or not)


1.  Testing (phase or role) makes developers complacent - a safety-net - remove it to make developers responsible.
2.  with so much focus on automated unit testing, test driven development, continuous integration - developers are producing quality software anyway
3. Finding problems is no big deal, we know where problems are (this is what James Whittaker said in his EURO STAR 2011 keynote). So do we need what testers for?
4. With cloud as popular software delivery model - you don't bother about bugs leaking. Time and effort to fix and turn around bug is ridiculously LOW - why bother testing?
5. What for you have crowd sourcing? Beta testing? - throw your stuff to users - let them use and tell us where are the bugs (there should not be many as we are group of smart developers and we know where the bugs are)



Thus,  the weakness in testing arises out of how we think about it  and what we want it to do for us. Thinking idealistically about how software is made and used, applying models from other fields without properly customizing them and removing or de-emphasizing the human element in the system  - are the key patterns of weakness in testing approaches




What do you people think?


Shrini