Rahul Verma: My Petty Bits

This is in response to an important thread started by Brijesh DEB that reflects a line of thought popularised by many proficient testers out there. The post says:

“Testing doesn’t assure quality
Testing doesn’t improve quality
Testing doesn’t reduce risks

Testing helps you collect information and identify risks. Testing helps you discover the unknown and uncover the unexpected. Testing helps you gauge the impact. This information and the knowledge of risks, unknowns and unexpected helps stakeholders take better decisions about the product.”

I want to add an interpretation here which is equally critical. Remember that there is nothing called an absolute truth. Every ‘truth’ is just a biased version of it. So, read my post also from this perspective. It’s my version.

Testing in itself, in its purity may not improve quality. (This caged, puristic version plays a good role in academic debates, rather than in practice because one does not look at a task and think “this chunk was testing, this was not.”. This anatomy is rarely useful. What matters is the maturity w.r.t. Quality as an outcome.)

A tester **can** improve quality. Let me add – A tester can **and should** improve quality. This is because a tester does more than the above puristic view of testing.

I am staying away for the words like Quality Assurance, Shift Left and so on, because I don’t think so that any shift is needed. Those who are thinking of shifting are the ones who went astray from the beginning. Testing as early and as often as it makes sense, does not need a name to be coined – it’s how testing is supposed to be. That’s if we go back to basics.

E.g. “No. of bugs prevented” could be a useless metric, as it is manipulatable. Bug prevention, though, in its unmeasurable, unmanipulated form, is a reality. Testing in time does prevent bugs. If you want to call it and make it a part of “assurance” and what not – go ahead but it’s not my game. I stand by the fact, that timely testing not only finds bugs, but also prevents more of them from becoming a part of the test object, when appropriate measures are taken. Some of these measures can be taken care of by a tester.