The FAMOUS QUOTES ON TESTING IN 2012
This was another great year for our Testing the Limits interview series. So to round out 2012, here’s a look back at some of our favorite quotes of the year.
January – Richard Stiennon
“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.”
February – Anne-Marie Charrett
“There’s a misconception that creating a visible testing structure is the equivalent of testing. This is not true. What makes a house a home? Not the roof or the external walls, but the people inside the house. It’s the same for testing. Testing is about the testers, their skill and discipline and how they interact and behave with others. That’s what companies need to focus on when setting up a team.”
“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.”
March – Testing Roundtable
“Real testing, to me, should be based on investigating how the software allows people to deal with what we call ‘exceptions’ or ‘corner cases.’ That’s what we call them, but if we bothered to look, we’d find out that they were a lot more common than we realize; routine, even.” – Michael Bolton
“Pretty good testing is easy to do (that’s partly why some people like to say ‘testing is dead’– they think testing isn’t needed as a special focus because they note that anyone can find at least some bugs some of the time). Excellent testing is quite hard to do.” – James Bach
“Testing has to be an integral part of developing software and not a separate phase. When this approach is taken, product quality is owned by everyone on the team. It is easy to state, but hard to put into practice because of long standing preconceived notions that developers and testers are better kept apart.” – James Sivak
“An explorer who doesn’t know much about testing probably won’t explore very well.” – Cem Kaner
April – Gerald Weinberg
“To me, the biggest weakness is not considering software testing anything but a (barely) necessary evil. Testing is seen as something that could be done by a troop of monkeys, so serious testers are treated like third-class individuals. The lack of means of acquiring testing skills arises from this attitude, as do most of the other poor practices in the testing business. You treat people as if they are stupid, then they will wind up acting stupid.”
“You can be a great tester if you have programming skills. You can also be a great tester if you have no programming skills at all. And, you can be a lousy tester with or without programming skills. A great tester will learn what skills she needs to continue to be great, in her own style.”
“Years ago, I thought punch cards were the last word in input. I thought that when I mastered sorting on magnetic tapes, I’d reached the ultimate in storage devices. I once thought that 2000 decimal digits was a vast amount of central storage. I guess what I’ve learned by now is that there is no ultimate technology, and if there were, I’d never live to see it.”
May – Galina Kramer
“My advice to anyone switching industries – GO FOR IT! Try new things and have some fun!! I love working in the gaming industry and never thought work can bring so much enjoyment.”
“It’s all about prioritization and risk assessment. We shuffle resources on a daily basis depending on a priority and work together. Teamwork is the key, truly.”
“When I interview testers the main thing I look for is Passion. A great manager once told me: ‘If an interview candidate does not know something you can teach him/her and in six months he/she can become an expert in the field. If a person doesn’t have passion inside of them – six months later he/she will still not have passion,’ I really believe in that.”
June – Seth Eliot
“If your company is dysfunctional, ask yourself if there is something you can do to turn it around and turn it into one of those dream successes. Learn new strategies and approaches for software engineering, change the direction, and bring new life to the company. At best you will be the hero, at worst you will have learned some valuable skills and lessons for finding that next job.”
“The advantage of Testing in Production is you find things you just cannot find (or are prohibitively expensive to find) pre-production. The corollary to this is that you should not be finding bugs in production that you could have easily found earlier by unit testing or simple functional testing.”
July - Scott Barber
“Testers want the products they are testing to be very good. This is a positive trait for a tester. I mean, really, what kind of information would you get from a tester who wanted the product they are testing to be mediocre? The companies who employ testers also want the products being tested to be very good. The problem is that the companies and the testers tend to have very different definitions of ‘very good.’ Testers want products to be free from bugs. Companies want products to be as profitable as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible for as long as possible.”
“What really needs to die about testing is all of the proclamations, unsubstantiated generalizations, closed-mindedness, argumentativeness, debating, personal venom and rubbernecking surrounding the ‘right’ or ‘best’ way to test. I just keep thinking that if all the people touting ‘right’ or ‘best,’ all the people countering them and all the people who can’t seem to look away (probably due to the entertainment factor) would just forget about ‘right’ and ‘best’ in favor of collaboratively figuring out how to produce higher quality software faster and cheaper. … I’ll let you in on a secret. There is no one ‘right’ and there is no single ‘best’ and there never will be.”
August – Bob Binder
“Testing burns money and it has to earn its keep. I always seek to optimize what test can do, but that’s specific to each situation. The client decides what reliability they have to have, how much they’re willing to spend to get that, and what kind of disruption they can tolerate getting there. Sometimes, education about these issues is helpful. I bring an ever-increasing bag of tricks to every situation. The puzzle is how to use available people, tools, and techniques to deliver the best possible result within the constraints of a particular situation.”
“Testing is mostly a search problem – we know bugs exist, but we can only guess where they might be hiding. To the extent we have clues about those hiding places, we should use them.”
September – Lee Henson
“Agile testing makes both developers and testers better at what they do. It forces them to think outside the box and blurs the line for many when it comes to cross-pollination. Developers want to write better code to impress the testers and avoid having to frequently revisit and refactor code. Testers learn to better understand how code works and functions which increases their proficiency at writing meaningful tests. This increases the value of your product and organization.”
“Great GUI testing reminds me of being a great chef. While the developers are micro focused on preparing the perfect recipe, all the end user wants is a prepared dish that exceeds their expectations when it comes to taste. We need to take more time to understand at a greater depth who our intended audience is and make certain that the recipe matches their tastes.”
“I really like Agile testing because it draws emphasis to the truth about pushing forward. It eliminates indecision. It points out that the very worst that can happen is that you make an incorrect decision early and you have enough time in the process to course correct. Traditional environments only allow you to learn about the failures at the end and do not promote best decision making practices.”
October – Karen N. Johnson
“We should never lose sight of what solution a product provides and our need to test from that perspective. I think because there are so many devices, operating systems and a large array of configurations to test, we seem particularly eager to automate mobile testing but if you don’t know what you need to test manually, you’re not ready to build automation.”
“What’s interesting about mobile and usability is that for the past decade, we’ve learned about web testing and have stabilized and matured the web market and now mobile comes along and introduces another market to figure out. What’s usable and makes sense on a desktop is not the same as what’s usable on mobile. Usability needs to be reconsidered and as testers, we have an opportunity to find not just functional issues and defects but to highlight usability concerns.”
November – Paul Holland
“I think that the only way to perform good testing is to adapt the approach to your testing mission to your own specific environment or context. You will be missing some major testing areas without considering how your current situation is different to other situations in which you have been involved. There is no way to apply the same techniques and process to every testing situation and have your testing be efficient and effective.”
“Some testers love hands-on testing, while others like to solve problems, some like to write, others like to code. There are so many options that a good tester can follow. My advice is to find a job that you really enjoy doing and do that – hopefully you will end up being well paid to do that job.”
- Contents by TECHGIG.com
Written by Dhruv Kalaria
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