no more testers?

no more testers? | Tmao Coders

no more testers? | Tmao Coders — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:26:23 GMT

PingBack from http://www.tmao.info/no-more-testers/

re: no more testers?

travelgirl — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:16:26 GMT

would you care to comment on why microsoft (and other companies) are headed towards the "let's automate everything" end of the testing spectrum, where requiring test engineers to become what is in essence a junior developer position is the norm around the company?

i'm a contractor on a very visual project, and i'm constantly surprised by the amount of time we spend to automate the simplest tests, tests that could and should be done manually for a wide range of reasons, not the least of which is the total cost to implement the automation...

re: no more testers?

mm31 — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:12:33 GMT

I'm not from MSFT, so JW will be able to give his (inside) thoughts on this, but here's mine.

Automated testing is prefered to manual in many respects, but mostly because of reuse in regression testing. MSFT has so many platforms, environments, versions, patches, etc, etc, to test on, manually doing each of these becomes intractable (all depends on the product, obviously).

A manual tester's "time" spent testing is a one-off activity - maybe it finds bugs, maybe it doesn't in that environment/version. A tester creating an automated test becomes an "asset", like code (once again, really depends on the "quality" and "usefullness" of the test case).

In saying all this, I'm very much with James that manual testing is not only practical, but necessary - many bugs simply cannot be found in an automated way. However, we really need to be automating more, and pushing that state-of-the-art because as software gets bigger/more complex, the issue(s) of testing it all become intractable for the number of testers we have.

That (IMHO) is one of the things James is pushing for - increasing the role, and skills, of testers into the developement so we can have more impact.

re: no more testers?

nachrichten — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:21:13 GMT

Maybe most of present tools are very successful. And they prefer simply to use them instead of testing new ones :)

re: no more testers?

James Whittaker — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:31:51 GMT

Good points but I don't think Microsoft is headed in the automate everything direction any longer. I think that there is a very good appreciation for manual testing. Let's face it, there are some bugs that require a brain in the loop to find.

There is a wave of interest and appreciation for manual testing here that I think you are going to be hearing a lot more about on this blog in the coming months.

re: no more testers?

Mister Li — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:30:11 GMT

Oh Michael was probably just teasing you James ;) As a "real tester", he will certainly have caught the message.

As to "there are some bugs that require a brain in the loop...": I would say: the real bugs are a result of the fact that software development is essentially a social, creative process. Bugs do not come about because someone intentionally put them where we found them (or at least I like to think so :)), but because all people involved so far have not thought of the possibility of the real-world-software-reality which is exposed at that time.

Anyway I greatly enjoyed your presentations (as you will have guessed from my smile :))

A szoftver minőségbiztosítási eszközök valós lehetőségei és korlátai

Termékinformációk fejlesztőknek — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:09:24 GMT

[Nacsa Sándor, 2009. január 13. – február 3.]  A minőségbiztosítás kérdésköre szinte alig ismert

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition with MSDN Premium Subscription

Termékinformációk fejlesztőknek — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:01:02 GMT

[ Nacsa Sándor , 2009. február 6.] Ez a Team System változat a webalkalmazások és –szolgáltatások teszteléséhez