Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 2

Last week I posted a long list of reasons for testing software, crowdsourced from members of the Association for Software Testing and software professionals on Twitter and LinkedIn.

This week I've done some rough and ready analysis to see what's common across them and the results are at the top. A few notes:

Information includes learning and feedback.
Risks are unspecified or explicit (such as damage to reputation and costs).
Confidence covers reducing uncertainty and sleeping well.
Finding problems incorporates the fallibility of (other) humans.
There are definitely other ways to classify and cluster this data.

Testing, for me, is the pursuit of relevant incongruity. I didn't include my answers in the previous post but this is what I dropped into the conversation on the AST Slack:

To check that it can do what we intended it should do.
To look for ways in which it does things it wasn't intended to do.

I think they're in the space the leftmost columns cover but I'm also firmly on the right, down at the fun end of the scale:

I enjoy the social, technical, and intellectual challenges immensely.

There might be loads of reasons to test, but testing itself is a reason to be cheerful.
Soundtrack: Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Comments

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The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the Tester's Union, is to ask why we don&

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The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

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