If you have an adversarial relationship between testers and developers, you’re doing it wrong. Once got asked in a job interview “How do you avoid going native?”, and thought that was a rather ridiculous question. The common enemy is the bugs.
“Exploratory Testing” isn’t some revolutionary new technique, but describes what I’ve actually been doing for years. Ticking boxes on a test script is not only dull work, but you’re far less likely to discover any significant bugs.
If you’re supposed to be testing an interface with a third party product, and the third party product starts returning messages like “Object reference not set to an instance of this object”, then you’re also performing acceptance testing on the third party product regardless of whether that was supposed to have been within the scope of your testing.
Just because the functional specification says it’s a common function does not necessarily mean that it’s been implemented as a common piece of code.
Test automation is an awful lot harder than either management thinks it is, or the tool vendors claim it is. Scripting high-volume repetitive tasks on a small part of the system adds a lot more value than attempting to automate an entire end-to-end process.
Using metrics related to bugs logged to measure performance of developers is just asking for trouble. It just politicises the process of logging bugs and does nothing for software quality.
Sanitising your test data because somebody needs to use one of the test databases for a pre-sales demo is occasionally part of the job. So is verifying that the customer data that’s supposed to have been scrambled and anonymised actually has been. Good way to test this is to copy and past a name and address into Google, and see if it finds a match. So there is no such address as “Apocalypstick Avenue, Elektra City”. Turns out there really is a Platypus Road, but not in Scunthorpe. Their local authority’s pest control department is unlikely ever to have to deal with an infestation of tribbles…
Thinking of putting a few of these on my LinkedIn profile to make it less boring.
