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
