Read a Twitter handle profile that said “…because no more bug hunting”, and that got me going. For the records, Software Testing is not bug hunting. It’s a craft, an art, and a science. It is Software Testing Craftsmanship.
A set of people are trying to trivialize Software Testing as an after-thought, gate-keeping, bug-hunting effort. Software Testing is NOT just testing the developed code. It is about getting involved right from the requirements, learning, questioning, and providing insights and feedback. This is not now – we have been doing this for many decades. If your product development team is doing this as a bug-hunting mission, go educate them rather than dismissing Software Testing itself as bug-hunting.
Software Testing needs to be done while the product is being developed AND after the product is developed. There is no this or that. It is both (as Joshua Kerievsky says about many other things – and I replied his tweet to include about Software Testing). In spite of the fabulous attempts towards Agile, TDD, CI/CD, DevOps, and by the way adding the complexity of microservices, software continues to be complex as proven by multiple recent failures on the field (log4j, Rogers, ING Australia, Roblox, and Amazon’s own outages).
Catching and preventing defects early-on is great, and Software Testing is supportive of that, but that does not mean eliminating testing post-development. The excuse being given is that having a QA department is a problem. If your culture is broken, go fix the culture and leadership. It does not mean QA (and by the way, it’s a misnomer) department has to be removed. I have personally worked with teams where there were healthy, positive cultures that had separate QA departments with a person who is knowledgeable in Software Testing leading the effort.
For goodness sake, if Software Testing is gate-keeping, let it be, because we need all the gate-keeping before the software hits the customers. Not every software in the world is an easy e-commerce app whose shopping cart bugs can be fixed in continuous deployment. We have software whose automation tests themselves run for weeks for a line of code change.
And no, small and incremental changes is NOT EQUAL TO minor defects. Any kid who took Software Engineering in college knows that.
Let’s get serious about Software Testing and Software Quality, because software affects people’s lives on a daily basis.
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