Oftentimes, it has become pertinent for the Software Testing professionals to talk more about what is not Software Testing than what it is! It is because the social media platforms and online communities, in their interest to promote engagement, mix up techniques used while development as ‘advanced Software Testing’ techniques. In this blog, let us look at what is not Software Testing.
I came across a ‘collaborative’ article in LinkedIn, with a title ‘Here’s how you can master the advanced techniques of software testing like a pro.’ I got curious because I am always in the lookout for new ways of effectiveness in Software Testing. I thought I could learn a few methods to advance the craft which has been grinding to a boring slowdown in the past decade. So, I went and checked what advanced techniques are offered, and here’s what I saw:
- Learn automation – Duh! Enough said.
- Explore DevOps – This left me in splits. First let developers do the ops so that the objective of DevOps is achieved instead of having an ops team or delegating the work to a ‘platform’ team or a ‘SRE’ team, then testers can think of explore what it is. I think what the article probably means is CI/CD, which is useful to learn for the software development life cycle, but it is not an ‘advanced testing technique’!
- Master tools – See my comment for the first bullet
- Understand code – How exactly this is an ‘advanced testing technique’? Having knowledge of the implementation as ‘white box testing’ has been there around for decades, and it is not an advanced concept!
- Practice TDD – If someone who really knows what TDD is reads this, they will join the laugh party with me. TDD is a technique for refactoring unit code in the process of improving an unit implementation. This is a development activity. Testers can join ‘Ensemble Programming’ sessions where TDD is used for developing code in order to give their inputs from a quality perspective, but TDD is not an advanced testing technique.
- Analyze Data – Wow! From when data analysis became an advanced testing technique?!
LinkedIn may be trying to get a lot of engagement so that they collect text to feed their AI with ‘knowledge’, but these kind of misrepresentations of Software Testing will not lead them to collecting great knowledge. They should review the content written by their staff for these collaborate articles. Doing so will not only provide value for their articles, but also keep the knowledge accurate. Hope they listen.
For discussions regarding advanced testing techniques, feel free to get in touch with me.