Mission Statement, Definition of Software Testing, and Goals of Software Testing

What’s the difference between a good tester and a great tester? I think the main thing is the ability to think for yourself and to be able to incorporate your experiences as a tester back into the context of your testing practices.  I think that if you look at the software testing community and pay attention to who has good ideas and who does not, you’ll find that the vast majority of people with good ideas emphasize their experience, what they have learned from it, and how they incorporate that back into their testing.

Writing about my thoughts and experiences in software testing provides an opportunity for me to take a critical look at what I thought about a subject, assess it in the context of experience and information gained since I first came to think that way, and then update or reaffirm my thoughts on the subject. It also allows me to share my thoughts, experiences, successes and failures with others, creating an additional feedback loop. That, to me, is one of the real benefits because it keeps my thoughts and beliefs relevant rather than dogmatic.

So, if I’m planning to write about testing software, I guess I should start with what that means. If a software product is a solution to a problem, then software testing would be the activities we undertake to ensure that the solution not only addresses the problem, but that it addresses the problem correctly. Software testing transcends the traditional concept of just running test scripts on applications, and I think that’s what William Hetzel was getting at in The Complete Guide to Software Testing,when he said “testing is any activity aimed at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its required results.” Testing includes the analysis we perform on an oversimplified user story to find out what the meat of the story really is, the acceptance criteria we help establish, the conversations we have with the development team or product owner as the code is being written, on and on. I could even go a little on the heretical side and suggest that software testing is every activity that a tester performs that contributes to the dialog about the solution to the problem that we are trying to address.