I was recently struck by a glaring difference between how I and a programmer prepared for testing. Unlike the majority of the testing I am involved in, this particular testing 'phase' had to be scheduled in advance and we couldn't "just do it". This also meant we had more time to prepare and plan than we typically do. This 'waiting period' had its uses. We had time to create tools that might be useful and check the configuration of the systems we would be testing. The team, familiar with the concepts of exploratory testing, were comfortable with an approach that meant we did not spend the majority of the time pre-scripting tests [be they coded or in a spreadsheet etc]. We did however build a high-level checklist of areas to test and used this to drive our program of tools and configuration checking/fixing/building. The key difference I observed was the absolute nature of the programmers comparisons between our test systems and our live-production syste...
My thoughts on developing & testing.