The Role of Software Testing

This is my first post in the Bug Life Cycle Series. I need to talk about this because when it comes to the role of testing, it’s not clear. The Role of Software Testing is often mis-understood across the different stake holders of the application development & this list includes testers too.

Testing is considered to be part of Quality Assurance activity since the initial days of Software Development and the same trend is happening as of now too. Even most of the titles like QA Engineer / QA Lead are associated with Testers even though they are not performing the role of QA.

It’s good to capture the mission of Testing & align your test teams in that direction. Every one in the team must be clear on his / her role and see how the same is helping to achieve the mission of the team.

It’s good to note that

• Testing is not about assuring the quality into the systems because The Tester is not a Quality Police.
• Testing is not about targeting for Bug Free Product. It’s just impossible since you can’t build human brain into systems (Of course humans do commit mistakes).
• Testing is not about fighting with the Development Teams. Don’t act like the enemy of developers.
• Testing is not about just looking at the documents (so called BRS, SRS, FRS) and writing the test cases.
• Don’t fight with Developers on the issues need to be fixed for the release instead write good report that reduce the time to reproduce and debug.

Testing is a process followed to make things better. It helps to take informed decision by providing the relevant information based on the context.

My teachers made me better by giving the relevant feedback at every stage on my performance. This includes nurturing the concepts, performance in the tests & week areas in the subject. This information helped me to identify the areas missed / uncovered and to improve upon.

Testers need to identify the critical issues with the system as soon as possible and make sure that the information supplied is sufficient to reproduce the issue. We need to supply the information on the presence of bugs in the system to the stake holders. The information should help the stake holders to take informed decisions.

The following list helps

• Identify the different end users of the system and their interaction with the same.
• Capture the important scenarios for each end user. It’s good to note that we need to capture the story around the scenario and not just steps.
• Talk to different stake holders including the customers (incase if you have access) on how the feature might be used & capture the scenarios.
• Plan towards uncovering the critical issues of the system as early as possible

Final Thoughts

Focus towards what is import for the decision making. Try to uncover important issues first and provide the required information to reproduce and debug the same problem.