Yesterday, I attended a Software Testing related discussion towards better testing and quality. We picked topics and talked about them.
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One key thing that I observed is that there is a lot of awareness that need to be created about the terminology that the Software Testing field uses. There’s a lot of mix-ups on words, and several phrases are being used without due consideration on what they meant and what are the implications.
Some examples:
Manual Regression Testing / Regression Testing : This has become synonymous with executing a set of predetermined checks by hand or automation. But Regression is far from it. The word ‘regress’ means something has downgraded in quality due to some breakage and needs to be corrected. When a fix is provided to the breakage, the testing that is done to make sure that the fix works and also does not affect the other functionalities is Regression Testing. It is pretty much the testing that you would do for a functionality based on the context of the fix. Why then it should be a set of predetermined test cases that should be executed for a fix? This gives scope for misses and potential for the feature not being properly tested.
Quality Assurance: Software Testing is often replaced to be named as Quality Assurance. Think about it. Can any tester assure quality to anyone at any point of time in software? How do you prove that the quality is assured? For that matter, can even the organisations or the executives assure the customers quality? Why then call Software Testing as Quality Assurance?
Apart from the terminology, I asked what ‘Quality Engineering’ means – because I wanted to understand the actions and processes that are done as part of the job under Quality Engineering. Surprisingly, big silence. No one was ready to talk about it. Maybe please enlighten me as to what you do in your organisation as Quality Engineering.
We are almost done with 2022, but I feel that we are still we were around 2005, grappling with the basics. Instead of educating ourselves with the basics and getting stronger on what Software Testing is, we invent new keywords to appear cool and for SEO/SERP.
Wishing you a fundamentally strong 2023 towards better Software Quality!
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