Saturday, August 2, 2008

Being Adhoc better than being organized!!


Thousands of test cases well documented and being executed with each build manually, if thats called being organized then I prefer being adhoc. Whenever a module specs/code arrives to tester he/she creates hundreds of test cases and executes them manually for the first time and finds lots of bugs (if either tester is good or developer is bad or both :)). All these test cases are well documented and executed with each of the builds. With the time the bugs and regressions will be reduced on this module and the module gets stabilized. After reaching this stage executing the regression test cases may not be worth the efforts as it rarely find the bugs. In fact once module gets stabilized adhoc testing helps in finding more bugs. Have you ever observed a new guy joining a team when asked to test a stable product he still will be able to find few bugs which we couldn't, just because our mind becomes dumb as we are just executing the documented test cases manually. whereas new guy does adhoc testing and comes with some great cases where product might fail.


Actually this is what has made people think of testing profession as dumb/boring job. Testers spend most of time on repetitive tasks like test case execution, build deployment etc. So I am not saying that we should stop ourselves from executing regressions as that may cause serious issue/bug to be missed out, but take up the automation more aggressively. Also software testers always ends up using traditional tools which have many limitations while automating. Software testers should be able to use regular languages like C,C++,C#,Java as well for automation and not limit themselves to available tools as this will help in increasing automation coverage. With more stuff automated, testers can spend more time on creative testing.

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