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've been noticing a phenomenon lately, that is the over/misuse of the term Exploratory testing. As many testers seems to have kind of settled for the Exploratory testing paradigm and have moved to new frontiers like checking vs testing , it seems many other parties are really getting into it, and of course understanding it in different ways. Couple of examples of this phenomena: 1. In my final days as a consultant one of our sales people, had visited a customer who had no experiences about testing, but specifically requested the sales man to give a offer on Exploratory testing 2. I just looked at the program of Agile testing days 2013 , and really many of the testing related talks were labeled about Exploratory testing, although to me many seemed to talk/practice testing in generally It's nice that the Exploratory testing is gaining momentum, but I am also a bit worried about it. The examples listed above could be supported by many others, which kind of give me the impr...