Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Classic Testing Mistakes

The role of testing
  • Thinking the testing team is responsible for assuring quality.
  • Thinking that the purpose of testing is to find bugs.
  • Not finding the important bugs.
  • Not reporting usability problems.
  • No focus on an estimate of quality (and on the quality of that estimate).
  • Reporting bug data without putting it into context.
  • Starting testing too late (bug detection, not bug reduction)


Planning the complete testing effort
  • A testing effort biased toward functional testing.
  • Underemphasizing configuration testing.
  • Putting stress and load testing off to the last minute.
  • Not testing the documentation
  • Not testing installation procedures.
  • An overreliance on beta testing.
  • Finishing one testing task before moving on to the next.
  • Failing to correctly identify risky areas.
  • Sticking stubbornly to the test plan.


Personnel issues
  • Using testing as a transitional job for new programmers.
  • Recruiting testers from the ranks of failed programmers.
  • Testers are not domain experts.
  • Not seeking candidates from the customer service staff or technical writing staff.
  • Insisting that testers be able to program.
  • A testing team that lacks diversity.
  • A physical separation between developers and testers.
  • Believing that programmers can’t test their own code.
  • Programmers are neither trained nor motivated to test.


The tester at work
  • Paying more attention to running tests than to designing them.
  • Unreviewed test designs.
  • Being too specific about test inputs and procedures.
  • Not noticing and exploring “irrelevant” oddities.
  • Checking that the product does what it’s supposed to do, but not that it doesn’t do what it isn’t supposed to do.
  • Test suites that are understandable only by their owners.
  • Testing only through the user-visible interface.
  • Poor bug reporting.
  • Adding only regression tests when bugs are found.
  • Failing to take notes for the next testing effort.


Test automation
  • Attempting to automate all tests.
  • Expecting to rerun manual tests.
  • Using GUI capture/replay tools to reduce test creation cost.
  • Expecting regression tests to find a high proportion of new bugs.


Code coverage
  • Embracing code coverage with the devotion that only simple numbers can inspire.
  • Removing tests from a regression test suite just because they don’t add coverage.
  • Using coverage as a performance goal for testers.
  • Abandoning coverage entirely.

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