

Beauty of Testing - ctide
http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/09/25/beauty-of-testing/

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adrianhoward
_" Too often some view testing as primarily a function of large projects,
mature products, or big companies. One of the most critical hires a growing
team can make is that first testing leader"_

To be honest — I don't see that mistake much any more. Indeed I'm generally
much more upbeat about the current state of testing that the author of this
article seems to be.

The thing that strikes me most about testing is how much the profession and
practice has changed over the last twenty years. All for the better.

In the 90's and early 00's it was very much as the article says. Seen as
something for larger organisations only. Generally something done by a
separate person or team alone. Almost never something integrated with ongoing
development work (those ghastly integration sessions that took weeks and
months… shudder…). Almost never something that developers were involved with
themselves — which led to some god awful code coming out the end of the
sausage machine. Testers were generally seen as folk who couldn't hack
programming. And there were an awful lot of folk that I encountered with a
testing job title in those years who were bloody awful at their job — who were
basically human automated tests running through checklists and providing
relatively little value to the organisation.

These days every language has half a dozen test frameworks, supporting
different styles of automated testing. Knowledge of testing at some level is
_expected_ of developers.. Anybody but the rankest newbie should be able to
discuss it — even then I'd be pretty shocked if even the freshest of faces
didn't at least have an opinion and knowledge on the topic. Almost every
codebase that I interact with will have some kind of automated test suite.
Often really excellent ones. Testing is integrated into the development
process rather than being a separate phase. Because of this a huge number of
the dumb errors that the checklist-style tester had to catch are now caught by
machines. Which has freed up the professional tester to spend their efforts on
the hard problems. You get so much more value out of testers these days
because they're spending their time coming up with evil edge cases, isolating
those bastard intermittent issues, or feeding back a metric shed load of
issues from sessions of exploratory testing. Stuff they never had the time to
do when they were dealing with the errors that the devs should have caught
themselves.

Don't get me wrong. I still encounter teams that really, really need a
specialist tester but don't realise it. I still encounter teams that could be
way, way better at automated testing than they could be and their shipping
problems show it. The testing profession is currently having to deal with the
idiocy that is ISO (see
[http://commonsensetesting.org/stop29119/OpenLetter/](http://commonsensetesting.org/stop29119/OpenLetter/)).

Life's not perfect.

But compared to 20 years ago — the state of testing is good!

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mironathetin
Why do we have to read about testing from an ex-Microsoft employee (even
manger, if I am correctly informed)? A company that ships bs since its
beginnings.

Just see, what they do to skype, if you don't know what I am talking about.

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kabouseng
That's an extremely short sighted and uninformed viewpoint. Just because you
might not hold the person or context in high regard does not mean nothing
learned from his viewpoint / experience...

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mironathetin
I dont know the person, so I don't want to judge him. And I also agree, that
it can be possible to learn from everybodys viewpoint. That is a pretty
general statement though. The possibilities to learn something valuable
certainly vary by the source.

I hope you agree, that skype, that was a great software, has been
systematically wrecked by microsoft. It has not only become unusable, it
gathers more and more bugs (don't start to talk about the MS classics).

So MS did not get it in 40 years. You are still in good mood, that they have
something valuable to tell about software development? Certainly, there are
always new developers. But the culture did not change. Good luck with your
hope to still learn something valuable from MS. The chance is just not too
high, I guess. Yes, the author is not the company. But he takes his experience
from MS as an example.

And, btw., my viewpoint is neither uninformed nor shortsighted. It is pure
anger about 40 years of bad software and especially about ruining skype.

You one the other hand, assume things of me from 2 lines of comment. How can
you believe, this is less shortsighted than you think my comment is?

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jqm
Yes indeed Mr.Sinofsky. Testing is very important.

Also, testing user acceptance/ ease of use of use of the interface is also
important on a major product with millions of users. Let's not forget
that.....

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mironathetin
Sarcasm? Would you mind to go into detail?

