RE: [Wtr-general] A general question about the role of scripted testswithin the responsibilities of QA.

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:41:44 -0700

Title: Message
>At what point do these scripts allieviate some of the QA engineer's manual testing burden?
Until machines are intelligent, they can't really do testing at all. Testing to me is assessing risks, asking questions about software, using a guide to show me whether something is wrong, using techniques and tools to help ask questions of the software, and analyze results. Automated testing tools can't do any of that, but as a tester I can use them to help increase my efficiency. What task is a computer better at, or faster at, and how can I use the tool to make my testing work more efficient? So to me the manual testing is essential to complement the automated efforts. Automated tests are great for quick passes of certain kinds of tasks, and are nice for change detection.
 
They can't replace a human, but people can use them for more efficiency. Instead of doing a smoke test suite manually that might take hours or days, an automated smoke "change detection" suite can give me a rough approximation of changes in minutes or hours. Then as a tester I can focus on areas of risk, and spot check trouble spots. Efficiency is key to me, not trying to replace manual testing work. The former is achievable, the latter isn't going to happen. Over reliance on regression tests to do testing for us means that obvious problems a tester would spot immediately go out the door. The human eye can pattern match better than a computer can, and the mind behind the tools can investigate, use inference and track down tricky problems. many times when we are running a manual test, we discover a problem that is not related to the test. Many of the high impact bugs I've come across were something we stumbled upon when testing other things, investigated and fixed. A computer isn't curious, aware and can't investigate suspicious behavior like a tester can. I find those qualities valuable.
 
My $0.02
 
-Jonathan
 

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Michael Kelly
Sent: August 18, 2005 10:21 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Wtr-general] A general question about the role of scripted testswithin the responsibilities of QA.

My developer chums and I use Watir as part of our test-driven development.  As such, we're giddy to be able to finally write unit tests for the UI.  But the presence of these developer written UI test scripts raises questions about what impact, if any, they will have on what our QA engineer will focus on.  It's tempting to suggest that there is a whole set of functionality that they simply don't have to test manually anymore.  But clearly this is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  The developers will only write tests for the things they think of, and we all know that developers tend to be optimistic about their code.  In addition, the unit tests themselves can have flaws that cause a test to pass when the code is not, in fact, functioning properly.
 
So, it seems that we still need the QA engineer to do a full manual QA pass on the software.  At what point do these scripts allieviate some of the QA engineer's manual testing burden?
 
Thanks for your thoughts,
 
-=michael=-

--
Michael Kelly
Sr. Software Engineer
Eleven Wireless Inc. - The Possibilities are Wireless
http://www.elevenwireless.com

 

 
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