What? Did I say Taxonomy? Isn’t it about the living organisms? What has that to do with Software Testing? Let’s talk about Software Testing Taxonomy in this blog.
Taxonomy is generally about living organisms, and these days, the software-enabled robots and machines seem to have a mind of their own! With probability, calculus, algebra, data wrangling, meddling, and what not, the machines are irrecoverably part of our locked-down life! How grand! And that makes me think that taxonomy can indeed be applied to pick on a few sore thumbs out there on their arguments for and against the usage of ‘tests’ and ‘checks’.
I’ve been a tester for a very long time. When I started testing, there were no web applications. We had Windows and Solaris-based applications, and it was fun to keep the developers fixing the bugs the whole night, while we enjoyed testing to find the most nasty bugs.
“Testing” is not just the checks that you make be it manual or automated. You need human intelligence on top of that manual as well as automated checks, which can direct testing based on the context-sensitive results that you obtain by running tests. A machine cannot do that for you. You can claim that your A.I. program can intelligently select the tests for you, and select the paths to test. May be to some extent. But the steering control of guiding the testing should always be with a human, because machines are just machines, and they are at loss when they don’t know how to behave in an uncharted path.
So, when you are dealing with automation scripts, steps, and so on, call them, “automated checks”, not “automated tests”. Because “Testing” is human, and will stay human, because of the intelligence involved, which cannot be replaced by machines, at least in the foreseeable future.
That’s it folks. Enough taxonomy for you for now! Happy Testing!