Nightmare Acceptance Test

 

Squares, Bowls and Triangles

I never forget the speech of a Google test engineer many years back, when he started with a slide that showed nothing but just all red colors. He took a chair and sat near the audience watching the wall together with us and said nothing. After quite a while he stopped the pondering silence and stated: "one gets used to red colors if you only stare long enough to it".

The point he was making here was to never accept your test scripts to report failures for too long. You should immediately address newly introduced bugs and fix those. If you wait too long, more and more tests may go wrong until very soon, you don't get alerted anymore when new tests fail. It may become a normal situation for your tests to fail. This is not only true for automated testing. It applies the same way to manual testing. If you get used to all the flaws and error messages an SUT (software-under-test) reveals, it is just a question of time until you arrange with it.

You don't see these things anymore after a while until someone with fresh eyes points you to all these known but weird things happening on your screen. You may then realize that you may have been reeducated softly. Ask yourself whether you still wear the hat of a customer or have you already turned from a quality focused engineer to an ignorant which - almost in trance - automatically clicks away all the noise. You may explain to yourself that these are all known issues reported in the past and someone will care about sooner or later. Really? Reality shows that these issues are long forgotten; although saved, but in a deep ocean called backlog where none can or wants to touch them anymore. If a bug sits in the backlog for a while, the likelihood for it to die increases. If a bug hasn't been fixed till now, it probably isn't important enough to care about.

Quite some time ago, when I realized that, me too, was just about to get used to quirks, exceptions and error messages, that pop-up like huge bubbles created by a hunting whale, I communicated my perception to the team and it was a shock when I noticed that others seem to have already "fallen in love " with all this puzzle of inconsistency.

As a result I asked myself, do I allow to adopt the attitude of the squares, or am I an ignorant bowl unable to accept things may be seen differently or am I currently just a triangle who struggles to take a decision.  I think I need a therapy... =;O)

Confused Customer

OK, at the time I drew this cartoon, I thought, how would it feel if we testers suddenly got a call from a happy customer rather than the usual thing which is:

A P1 call on a Friday afternoon 4pm from a crestfallen customer after we deployed a new release the night before.

I asked myself, "how would it feel if we deployed a version that worked straightaway without any user running into troubles the day after we shipped the new release?"

Without expecting it ever to happen, only a few months later, we got forwarded an email from a customer who congratulated us for the great achievement. He was happy because we delivered a piece of software which worked at first go. The customer was surprised, since he did not expect this from us, so he felt he needed to tell us how amazed he was.

What does it tell me? It's obvious, that message was ambiguous. Did he really want to simply be grateful or did he want to tell us something else...?

BTW. ThanX to Rob Lambert who was so kind to include my cartoon into the free eBook "A Tester is for Life, Not Just for Christmas".