- Them: Hi, what do you do?
- Me: I’m a Tester.
- Them: Manual or Automation?
- Me: Manual
- Them: Oh that’s so easy no, writing and running test cases!
- Me: Ok🙄 I work in Automation
- Them: Ohh Selenium, you write and edit automation scripts(Ctrl C + Ctrl V + Google).
This is the kind of conversation I used to have with my friends and relatives who were from the “Non-testing” background during my early days as a Tester. Even today Non-Testers and some novice testers see testing this way. Blame it on the craze to become an Automation Tester.
I always received a constant push from my seniors, friends, and relatives to move away from testing. They always suggested me to try and switch to another trending, emerging technology.
Every time we met, they used to motivate me with all job recommendations and career options.
A few years later after a lot of study and mentorship that I received, I understood that this persona of Testers exists in the industry because there are many testers who say – “I don’t enjoy my job/ The work I do is pretty easy” than the Testers who say – “I love and enjoy my job/ My job is rather tough and a difficult one”
The majority of Testers don’t enjoy Testing because of the bad testing culture that they are a part of which only discusses/focuses on test cases, scripts, pass percentages, green reports, etc. Most of them the thought of testing stops at test cases.😒
However, times have significantly changed now. Not completely but yeah to a certain extent that the future ahead looks bright.
I have evolved as well. I love and enjoy what I do. I now address myself as a Contextual Tester. Testing is not just a Mon-Fri job for me, I enjoy Testing in my free time during weekends as well.
To all those who feel Testing is easy and anyone can do it, I want to ask a serious question – Why are you Testing? Why should you bother Testing?
Testing is just not about finding bugs and giving sign-offs with green reports. It’s a much deeper practice. Like Doctors practice Medicine and Lawyers practice Law, Testers need to practice Testing – A practice that involves Analysis, Understanding, Evaluation, Experimentation, Investigation, Observation, Advocacy, and Education (Educating others about our hypothesis and findings)
“Testing is the process of evaluating a product by learning about it through exploration and experimentation, which includes: questioning, study, modeling, observation and inference, output checking, etc.” – James Bach
Why should you bother Testing?
- To Make Well-Informed Decisions: Testing provides valuable insights into the performance and behavior of our product under various conditions/situations. Through testing, we can gather important data and metrics that can help the stakeholders make informed decisions about the product’s readiness. Testing allows us to identify potential issues, gaps, or areas for improvement, enabling us to incorporate them into our feedback loop and improve the product as per user expectations.
- To Assess and Reduce Risks: Testing helps us uncover potential threats to our product. Identifying and assessing risks early in the development cycle can help to mitigate and manage them better before they become costly problems. Not sure how to identify risks? Play the Nightmare Headlines Game with your Team 🙂
- To Ensure Essential Customer Satisfaction: Every product that is built is to solve/address a particular user problem. Testing helps us understand whether our product meets the expectations of the important user groups, whether they will be able to use this product, how it solves their problem, whether they will be satisfied with the solution our product provides, whether they will need additional support, whether it causes any additional/new problems to the user, etc.
- To Ensure the Product Meets Customer Expectations: Testing helps us ensure that our product aligns with what customers want. By incorporating user feedback and conducting usability tests, we can identify any gaps between customer expectations and the product’s capabilities. This enables us to refine and enhance the product to meet those expectations, reducing the risk of rejection due to a lack of desired features, functionalities, or capabilities.
- To Avoid Imposing Unacceptable Costs and Requirements: A poorly tested product can impose unexpected costs and requirements on customers. By thoroughly testing our product, we can identify and address any performance bottlenecks, resource-intensive requirements, or compatibility issues. This helps us avoid situations where customers find the product too costly to adopt, thereby increasing the chances of acceptance in the market.
- To Ensure that we Maintain Customer Confidence: Customer confidence is vital for the success and reputation of any product or brand. We all have a preferred UPI App/Website to make purchases or transfer money. As users, we trust that App because of the confidence and trust that it has built within us with minimal failures or downtime. Testing plays a crucial role in building and maintaining that confidence. By conducting reliability and stability tests, we can ensure that our product performs consistently, without unexpected failures or downtime. This instills trust in our customers, reassuring them that our product will deliver the promised value and reliability.
- To Ensure Customer’s Time is not Wasted: Inefficient or flawed products can waste valuable customer time preventing them from using our product. Imagine a food delivery app that takes more than 3min for each page/screen to load or a cab booking app that asks too many questions before booking every ride. In each of the cases, users would be frustrated and would look for other alternate solutions. Testing the product for usability issues, performance bottlenecks, or workflow inefficiencies helps to optimize user experience, making it more appealing and reducing the risk of rejection due to frustrating or time-consuming experiences.
- To Offer Cost-Effective Solutions: Affordability is a significant factor for customers when considering a product or service. Testing allows us to identify any aspects that make our product unnecessarily costly. By addressing these issues, such as reducing resource requirements or optimizing performance, we can ensure that our product remains cost-effective for the majority of customers. This increases the chances of acceptance and wider adoption in the market.
Does your Testing address all these issues? If yes, then welcome to the club! Long live Testing.
If not then you seriously need to question yourself – Are you really Testing? What for?
Recommended reading: Perfect Software and other illusions about Testing by Jerry Weinberg.
If you feel the same way about Testing, do share with me your stories about/around Testing.
Thanks for reading!