There have been discussions about Software Testing providing the necessary confidence about the quality of the software. Testing practitioners are looking for new, innovative metrics of defining this confidence, which is driven by the latest software development methodologies. While it is great to try to improve confidence of the software through these measures, the first step towards arriving that confidence is to have good clarity on how the software is working. In this blog, let us look at the importance of getting clarity towards gaining the confidence.
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Software development is not like car manufacturing. You cannot ‘see’ the software firsthand while it is being developed like you can do for a part of a car. You cannot inspect the software modules. This is exactly why I am very skeptical when someone quotes Edwards Deming while talking about Software Quality. Deming’s words, methodology, and philosophy was based on car manufacturing. Although some of those insights might be applicable to any development process in general, blindly quoting Deming’s sayings in the software context seems incorrect to me.
Since software cannot be inspected like a manufactured part, inspection of software relies on results of conducting tests. A test can contain several checks based on what the test practitioner aims to go through to disprove that the software works. Note that there could be one way of proving that a specific path of software works, but there could be many ways to disprove that the software works. This is what makes the Software Testing work challenging. While coming up with various scenarios to assess the software, it is required to note down the observations based on many tests/checks to provide clarity to the team as to what works and what does not.
Having that clarity based on the observations while doing tests on software is so important. Without this clarity, one cannot gain confidence. Can we blindly say that our confidence level is 75% without observations based on tests supporting it even if it’s just a ballpark? This is why clarity is the way towards confidence. Fix a discussion with me to talk in detail.
Happy Testing!