My Favourite Tool

Last week I did a presentation to a software testing course at EC Utbildning in Sweden titled Exploring with Automation where I demoed ways in which I use software tools to help me to test. Following up later, one of the students asked whether I had a favourite tool.

A favourite tool? Wow, so simple but sooo deep!

Asking for a favourite tool could make a great interview question, to understand the breadth and depth of a candidate's knowledge about tools, how they think about an apparently basic request with deep complexity beneath (favourite for what task, on what basis, in what contexts, over what timescale? what is a tool anyway?) and how they formulate a response to take all of that into account.

I could truthfully but unhelpfully answer this question with a curt Yes or No. Or I could try and give something more nuanced. I went for the latter.

At an extremely meta level I would echo Jerry Weinberg in Perfect Software:

The number one testing tool is not the computer, but the human brain — the brain in conjunction with eyes, ears, and other sense organs. No amount of computing power can compensate for brainless testing...

But in Testing Show I explained why I might also consider people as essential for testing.

At a slightly less meta level I would say that tools that help me to use my brain productively, pragmatically, and practically will have a chance of applying in any context, including those where we don't have acess to other tools. These include the scientific and engineering methods, comparison, and modelling. I talked about about some of them in How to Test Anything (blog, video).

Reducing the metaness again, my answer might be tools that can create tools — tool factories if you like. These are extremely valuable because of their flexibility. At a very base level, I can use shell scripts to simply stitch together other tools into a new tool (e.g. interacting with a search engine), I might exploit a third-party library that has capabilities that I need (e.g. publishing to Confluence), or I might write a test harness from scratch (which I did for the scenario in Testing Generally).

And bottoming out with something more atomic, I might say that in the moment the tool that solves my problem is my favouite. But, over the long term if you really pushed me and didn't give me a specific context, I'd go for three relatively generic tools:

A text editor allows me to take notes without breaking flow while testing. I can also write and explore my ideas there, I can write scripts, and I can even use data manipulation functions such as search-and-replace.
A spreadsheet gives me access to numerical data formatting, processing, and visualisation, all of which facilitate exploration.
A pen and paper gives me a graphical lens through which to think about whatever I'm testing, and to share my thoughts with others.

But what do you think?
Image: Discogs

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This article was curated as a part of #42nd Issue of Software Testing Notes Newsletter.
https://softwaretestingnotes.substack.com/p/issue-42-software-testing-notes

January 20, 2022 at 6:18 AM

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