Hell of a Tester

Here's another chat I have had many times. It starts with the golden and notorious question of "how much should you test". And it then drifts a bit from there. ******** How much should you test? "Well, you know, I used to work once in this team doing a medical device where releasing frequently was not really possible due to the many constraints. And even doing a small release would cost a lot . And it being a class C (death or serious injury may occur) device all issues found on a released product would have been a pretty big deal. So this meant that we took unbugginess very seriously, and thus that I had a lot of time to spend testing the device. And boy did I. I spent sometimes almost like the entire week just in front of the machine testing, thinking of ways how it could fail, unrolling all the test techniques I got in me, learning the ins and outs of the product. And then one day when the new release was done.... several problems were found. So taken ...

I share this story every once and then when talking to people, so thought to write it here too. About 8 years ago I had got my second consulting gig, working on a big company and on a huge project. And as huge projects normally go it was already very late and presumably very over budget. This had caused a pretty tense atmosphere around the project and things that delayed it further were not looked very fondly on.  And so it happened that I made a mistake of that sort. It was kind of done by a person I was "coordinating", failing to provide a complete set of specifications we had worked on to a vendor, resulting in a release missing a lot of important stuff. I was very stressed being a pretty new kid on the block and considering my options, whether to lay low, blame the coordinate or the vendor, quit, etc. But in the end decided that I would go for admittance. So I walked to the office of the rather intimidating program manager, knocked, went in and said that "I messe...