Exploring What if Questions

Exploring What If possibilities is an open, fun stage of questioning and its sometimes important not to rush this process.

Do u agree this?

Have u ever sit with or live with those questions for longer time so that mind start giving answers on its own and thats where creativity also origins…When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas
can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways.

Esp these days it may seem strange…as we have gotten used to having our queries or questions answered quickly that too in bite-size servings.

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Obviously, “what-how-why” are the questions that are critical parts of testing, however, I have a different opinion on this topic as I feel nowadays, delivery of product as per Requirement is prioritized over “What-If,” and we are focusing on meeting requirements first and keeping aside the edge cases for spare time which teams are not getting much these days due to hectic sprint planning.
There are many factors impacting the overall “What -If” scenarios :

  1. There are so many competitors for every product in the market that every company is rushing toward fast delivery of features to remain ahead in the market however that is impacting the quality, testers are getting less time to think and explore the product through their creativity.

  2. Due to micro-management testers are unable to explore the product freely and they have to report every single detail to the leadership which somehow impacts their mental health including creativity.

  3. We are becoming impatient, our basic thought process now is that when we can find the answer in a blink then why spend hours exploring when it is not guaranteed where it will lead, that is the most negative point that is impacting and will impact creativity in the future.

But yes when it comes to “What If” then obviously mind can explore solutions by connecting multiple dots. Writing all the possible scenarios on paper and then finding how they are related to each other as well to “What-If” can be helpful, because sometime when we write something physically then that gives different vibes to brain.

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@ujjwal.singh
In all seriousness, if that is how QA is perceived by an employer then it would be time to move.

Quality needs to be considered right at the beginning - we have fallen foul to this a lot, but the thought process is changing.

When generating the Acceptance Criteria or in Refinement, that is your time to shine and look at the ‘What if’ scenarios and discuss any proposals.

There is still going to be an occasion where the scenario is not realised - that is fine, be agile about it and work on it on another task. (Assuming you are agile and deploy at frequent intervals.)

Micro- managers, love them or hate them - but why employ someone you do not trust to ‘get the job done as requested’. I let all my QA access to roam and encourage exploratory testing - this increases product knowledge as and such reduces missing the ‘what if’ questions.

Impatient - always happens, but there has to be a ‘line’ where we say, we have done as much as we can. But that is down to experience and confidence in the team.

@komalgc I totally agree with you - it is ‘fun’ - but it is also Very Important. Again however, this should be a timeboxed exercise.

All software is straightforward ‘until you involve a user’ :joy:

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Testing is not a process of demonstrating that the product can work.
Its a process of trying to understand how it might not work That’s mainly what testing is the purpose of testing.

And the reason why i know that is …if the purpose of testing was to demonstrate that the product can work, we wouldn’t need testers at all.

Because everybody already assumes that the product works without testers around. Everyone already believes it works.

Developers job is to make it work. Why wouldn’t it work? Its only if you are worried that you bring testers in.

And if you’re worried you dont want the testers to just tell you what you already know.

Also there is a big market for fake software testing, when business pretends to test the software so that they dont get in touble with their customers and with the authorities. Coz noone accepts product without tried n tested.

So people hire testers just so that can play blame game if something breaks . IF business doesn’t really want you to do real testing, in which case they are not give u time to do it.

And if you try to think critically, they are gonna yell at you and say youre being negative, time consuming.Coz real testing takes time.
And its a big problem in industry.

So we just have to cope with it as best we can.
And part of that is by trying to explain to our clients why it is that they should want us to think critically about the product.

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