Stick in software testing long enough, and you will see enough ideas come and go to be able to sort out the ones that look promising to work, and the ones that you just hope will go away soon enough so that no manager will pay any of her attention to it. There have been quite a few in the history of software testing, and from my experience the worst things started to happen every time when someone tried to replace a skilled tester with some piece of automation – whether that particular automation was a tool-based approach or some sort of scripted testing approach.
Why do we test software?
If we were able to write software right the first time, there would be clearly no need to test it. Unfortunately we humans are way from perfect. Take for example the book I wrote mostly through 2011. 200 pages, lots of reviewing, production planning, and stuff happening in the end. And still, while reviewing the German translation, I spotted a problem in the book – clearly visible at face value. I had spend at least 2 weeks after work to go through the book once more, and get everything right. Yet, I failed to see this obvious problem.
The problem lies in our second-order ignorance: the things we don’t know that we don’t know them. These are the things of good hope, and prayers that it will work. Murphy’s Law also has a role to play here.
The very act of software testing then becomes to find out as much information about our unawareness as possible. This includes not only exercising the product, but also finding out new things about the product. Skilled testers learn more about the product and the product domain and the development team over the course of the whole product lifecycle.
Why do we repeat tests?
But how come we focus on regressions to often in our industry? It has to do with first-order ignorance. A regression problem is a bug that gets introduced a second time, although it already had been fixed in the meantime. Since we were already fully aware of the problem, the bug is no longer something that we don’t that we don’t know it. It has become something that we know now, but we don’t know whether we will know it still tomorrow. That’s why we introduce a regression check for tomorrow, so that it will remind us about the problem that we tried to avoid at this time.
Read that sentence again. Yes, it’s speculation. We speculate that we might break the software tomorrow again. With this speculation comes a whole lot of costs. We have opportunity costs for doing the test, for automating it, and with every run, we have the opportunity cost of analyzing the result (if we have to).
We wouldn’t need this if we were able to realize that a regression bug introduced in our software is an opportunity to learn what is not working in our current process that caused that bug to re-occur. Every regression bug discovered should be an invitation to start a root cause analysis and fix the underlying problem rather than deal with the symptoms.
Source: http://www.shino.de/2013/02/04/software-testing-is-not-a-commodity/