Today, someone on Twitter pointed to an interesting blog post by Alan Page of Microsoft. He says:

“How do testers determine if a bug is a bug anyone would care about vs. a bug that directly impacts quality (or the customers perception of quality)? (or something in between?) Of course, testers should report anything that may annoy a user, but learning to differentiate between an ‘it could be better’ bug and a ‘oh-my-gosh-fix-this’ bug is a skill that some testers seem to learn slowly. … “So what is it that makes some testers zero in on critical issues, while others get lost in the weeds?”

I believe I have some answers to this. My answers are based on roughly 20 years of observation and experience in consulting, training, and working with other testers. The forms of interaction have included in-class training; online coaching via video, voice, and text; face-to-face conversation in workplaces, conferences, and workshops; direct collaboration with other working testers in mass-market commercial software, financial services, retail services, specialized mathematical applications, and several other domains.

My first answer is that testing, for a long time and in many places, has been myopically focused on functional correctness, rather than on value to people. Cem Kaner discusses this issue in his talk Software Testing as a Social Science, and later variations on it. This problem in testing is a subset of a larger problem in computer science and software engineering. Introductory texts often observe that a computer program is “a set of instructions for a computer”. Kaner’s definition of a computer program as “a communication among several humans and computers, distributed over distance and time, that contains instructions that can be executed a computer” goes some distance towards addressing the problem; his explication that “the point of the program is to provide value to the stakeholders” goes further still. When the definition of programming is reduced to producing “a set of instructions for a computer”, it misses the point—value to people—and when testing is reduced to the checking of those instructions, the “testing” will miss the same point. I’ve suggested in recent talks that testing is “the investigation of systems composed of people, computer programs, related products and services.” Successful testers avoid a fascination with functional correctness, and focus on ways in which people might obtain value from a program—or have their value unfulfilled or threatened.

This first answer gives rise to my second: that when testing is focused on functional correctness, it becomes a confirmatory, verification-oriented task, rather than an exploratory, discovery-oriented set of processes. This is not a new problem. It’s old enough that Glenford Myers tried (more or less unsuccessfully, it seems) to argue against it in The Art of Software Testing in 1979. Myers’ point was the testing should be premised on trying to expose the program’s failures, rather than on trying to confirm that it works. Psychological research before and since Myers’ book (in particular Klayman and Ha’s paper on confirmation bias) shows that the positive test heuristic biases people towards choosing tests that demonstrate fit with a working hypothesis (showing THAT it works), rather than tests that drive towards final rule discovery (showing how it works, and more important, how it might fail). Worse yet, I’ve heard numerous reports of development and test managers urging testers to “make sure the tests pass”. The trouble with passing tests is that they don’t expose threats to value. Every function in the program code might be checked and found correct, but the product might be unusable. As in Alan’s example, the phone might make calls perfectly, but unless we model the way people actually use the product—talking for more than three minutes at a time, say—we will miss important problems. Every function might work perfectly, but we might fail to observe missing functionality. Every function might work perfectly, but we might miss terrible compatibility problems. Functional correctness is a very important thing in computer software, but it’s not the only thing. (See the “Quality Criteria” section of the Heuristic Test Strategy Model for suggestions.) Testers “who zero in critical issues” avoid the confirmation trap.

My third answer (related to the first two) is that when testing is focused on confirming functional correctness, a lot of other information gets left lying on the table. Testing becomes a search for finding errors, rather than on finding issues. That is, testers become oriented towards reporting bugs, and less oriented towards the discovery of issues—things that aren’t bugs, necessarily, but that threaten the value of testing and of the project generally. I’ve written recently about issues here. Successful testers recognize issues that represent obstacles to their missions and strategies, and work around them or seek help.

My fourth answer is that many (in my unscientific sample, most) testers are poorly versed in the skills of test framing. This is understandable, at least in part because test framing itself wasn’t known by that name as recently as a year ago as I write. Test framing is the set of logical connections that structure and inform a test. It involves the capacity to follow and express a line of perhaps informal yet reasonably structured logic that directly links the testing mission to the tests and their results. In my experience, most testers are unable to trace this logical line quickly and expertly. There are many roots for this problem. The earlier answers above provide part of the explanation; the mission of value to the customer is overwhelmed by the mission of proving functional correctness. In situations where the process of test design is separated from test execution (as in environments that take a highly scripted approach to testing), the steps to perform the test and observe the results are typically listed explicitly, but the motivation for performing the test is often left out. In situations where test execution, observation of outcomes, and reporting of test results is heavily delegated to automation, motivation is even further disconnected from the mission. In such environments, focus is directed towards getting the automation to follow a script, rather using than automation to assist in probing for problems. In such environments, focus is often on the quantity of tests or the quantity of bug reports, rather than on the quality, the value, of the information revealed by testing. Testers who find problems successfully can link tests, test activities, and test results to the mission. They’re far more concerned about the quality of the information they provide than the quantity.

My fifth answer is that in many organizations there is insufficient diversity of tester skills, mindsets, and approaches for finding the great diversity of problems that might lurk in the product. This problem starts in various ways. In some organizations, testers are drawn exclusively from the business. In others, testers are required to have programming skills before they can be considered for the job. And then things get left out. Testers who need training or experience in the business domain don’t get it, and are kept separated from the business people (that’s a classic example of an issue). Testers aren’t given training in software design, programming, or related skills. They’re not given training in testing, problem reporting and bug advocacy, design of experiments. They’re not given training or education in anthropology, critical thinking, systems thinking, or philosophy and other disciplines that inform excellent testing. Successful testers tend to take on diversified skills, knowledge, and tactics, and when those skills are lacking, they collaborate with people who have them.

Note that I’m not suggesting here that anyone become a Donald Knuth-level programmer, a Pierre Bourdieu-league anthropologist, a Ross Ashby-class systems thinker, a Wittgenstein-grade philosopher. I am suggesting that testers be given sufficient training and opportunity to learn to program to the level of Brian Marick’s Everyday Scripting with Ruby, and that they be given classes, experience, and challenges in observation, the business domain, systems thinking and critical thinking. I am suggesting that people who are testing computer software do need some exposure to core ideas about logic (if we see this, can we justifiably infer that?), about ontology (what are our systems of knowledge about the way things work—especially related to computer programs and to testing), and about epistemology (how do we know what we know?).

I’ve been told by people involved in the design of testing standards that “you can’t expect regular testers to learn epistemology, for goodness’ sake”. Well, I’m saying that we can and that we must at least provide opportunities for learning, to the degree that testers can frame their mission, their ideas about risk, their testing, and their evaluation of the product in the ways that their clients value. Moreover, I’ve worked with testing organizations that have done that, and the results have been impressive. Sometimes I hear people saying “what if we train our testers and they leave?” As one wag on Twitter replied (I wish I knew who), “What if you don’t train them and they stay?”

In our classes, James Bach and I have the experience of inspriring testers to become interested in and excited by these topics. We find that it’s not hard to do that. We remain concerned about the capacity of some organizations to sustain that enthusiasm, often because some middle managers’ misconceptions about the practice and value of testing can squash both enthusiasm and value in a hurry. Testers, to be successful, must be given the freedom and responsibility to explore and to contribute what they’ve learned back to their team and to the rest of the organization.

So, what would we advise?

Read this set of ideas as a system, rather than as a linear list:



The purpose of testing is to identify threats to the value of the program. Functional errors are only one kind of threat to the value of the program.

Take on expansive ideas about what might constitute—or threaten—the quality of the product.

Dynamically manage your focus to exercise the product and test those ideas about value.

In hiring, staffing, and training, focus on the mindset and the skill set of the individual tester as a member of a highly diversified team.

As an individual tester, develop and diversify your skills and your strategies.

Immediately identify report issues that threaten the value of the testing effort and of the project generally. Solve the ones you can; raise team and management awareness of the costs and risks of issues, in order to get attention and help.

Learn to frame your testing and to compose, edit, narrate and justify a compelling testing story.

Don’t try to control or restrain testers; grant them the freedom—along with the responsibility to discover what they will. Given that… they will.



Share this: Email

More

Facebook

Twitter



LinkedIn

Reddit



Tumblr



Related

Want to know more? Learn about upcoming Rapid Software Testing classes here.