Sunday 26 October 2008

CSI Testing

Finding the first defect on a program can be a bittersweet moment.
Finding one means that you have some evidence to show that it's worth having a tester on your team, thats one less defect a customer is going to find ( assuming it does get fixed )so rah rah RAH to the tester team.
Thw downside is that it means there is a defect in the product, once again it has been shown that humans + software writing = mistakes

In a recent blog entry, James Whittaker was trying to explain to his son which part he did and was unable to give him a satisfactory answer.

Which led me to thinking about one of the common 'testing is like...' analogies and that is the being a tester is like being a detective such as this one
Do detectives/police have the same bittersweet moment when they get called to a crime scene ? Do they involve themselves in the process of the work, collecting evidence etc, that they dont see the bigger picture and wish there was no crimes for them to be called out to ? Do they wish they could tackle the root causes of the crime rather than the aftermath ?

Or are they happy to go off and " create a GUI interface in Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address."

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