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The Like-Live Paradox

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...

Google testing blog comment...

I recently read a post on the G o o g l e Testing blog titled:  How Google Tests Software - Part Three . I added a comment to the post, but that comment has yet to appear . I thought I'd add post my comment here in the mean time. (I've added some links here, for the curious) “I agree that 'quality' can not be 'tested in'. But the approach you describe appears to go-ahead and attempt to do something just , if not more, difficult. You suggest that a programmer will produce quality work by just coding 'better'. While a skilled and experienced programmer is capable of producing high quality software, who will tell them when they don't or can't? We are all potentially victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and as such we need co-workers to help. There are a host of biases that stop a programmer, product owner or project manager from questioning their work. The confirmation and congruence bias to name just two. These are magnified by group-think...