I’m looking for your thoughts/feedback on something thats been running around in my mind around Testing Principles and a mnemonic we could use to explain to people what testing involves.
I played around with various words and phrases and came up with a real rather than a made-up word:
PRACTICE: P — Proactive; Early and continuous testing lowers cost.
R — Reflective; Defects are indicators of potentially deeper issues - we can learn from them.
A — Adaptable; The context determines the right testing approach.
C — Collaborative; Quality is a shared responsibility.
T — Timely; Exhaustive testing is impractical; we prioritise what matters.
I — Investigative; Testing is a cognitive, analytical craft.
C — Communicative; Communication is key to effective testing.
E — Exploratory; Testing is about discovering information.
Each of these does expand with more context, but before making this too big a post, I wondered what you thought of these as a starting point.
Thanks!
I’d probably have the T as thought driven. You could still have the point of focusing on the biggest risks as you can’t do everything. But I feel a lot of people in software development don’t see testers as thought workers, and they should
I struggled to get everything I wanted within a reasonably short word. I like the idea of adding in thought workers - do you have one word you’d propose for that?
Would that duplicate Investigative? If so I can remove it, but then need an ‘I’ word that covers Timely as I think thats an important point.
I saw investigative as more towards exploration.
Thoughtful could be used with explanations that the quality of thought done up front drives the quality of outcomes
Hey, looks good! I know that it’s hard to get everything across the way you want to with something as compact as a mnemonic, so don’t stress too much about getting it “perfect”.
To Ady’s point re “investigative” being close to exploratory, perhaps you could substitute it with “insightful”. I wrote this post way back about testers providing insight, maybe it helps: Why Testers Need to Provide Insight | Cassandra HL
Hey Cassandra, thank you, I like Insightful - your blog post definitely helps with the context, and I think it fits in really well with the other points.
Really does feel as though I’m getting there - and its good to have other viewpoints on this.
I also suspect, that in the same way as it has gotten people to suggest changes, this exercise in itself proves how valuable both “exploration” and just “thought-process” are.
The reason I liked “T - Timely” , is because in my current role I cannot hope to test everything. this morning I discovered a feature I knew all along had existed , but very far in the back of my mind. I’d love to write a regression-test for it, but I just have to do other more critical testing earlier of new features that customers actually are going to be using, not old stuff that can wait.
I do think Timely has a place as the point is that we cannot test everything so have to use good judgement, engage with stakeholders and agree where we believe the focus needs to be. We have a role to play here by highlighting risks, issues and anything else that the team may be unaware of.
Sometimes we just have to add something to the backlog for another time, even though we’d love to tackle it right away.
