The Role of Testing in Process Enhancement

Are you missing something with your testing? Do you know how testing can help drive process improvement as part of a project?

Ok, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, "...well we’ve always done it that way" or ‘"...well, we’ve always done it like that".

If I had even 10p for every time I’d heard either of those from a client, I’d be typing this on a Caribbean beach with Cindy Crawford bringing me half a lager and a complimentary dish of dry roasted nuts! 

What would we put in Room 101...

Today’s blog is about pet 'computer experience' hates, ’Better out than in!’ so they say. Let's refer to it as my ‘Testing Room 101’ target list. 

The reality is, these are experienced by people across the board and not just software testers, of course! Perhaps the line of work of a software tester makes them more noticeable or perhaps they subconsciously look for them. There’s nothing like a good rant to get things off your chest when things are annoying, so here goes! How many of these are on your pet hate list?

Take The Driving Seat

Before you can begin to improve software testing in your organisation, you need to refresh yourself as to why testing is so important. It’s very easy to take things for granted; take your car for example, you get in, start it up and drive. You never think it’s not going to start or breakdown. There was a time though when cars were poorly made, forever breaking down and a real source of disappointment. Now, cars are largely fault free thanks to advanced engineering and software design and of course very thorough testing. There are millions of lines of code in each modern vehicle, and each line of code has been tested many, many times under many conditions to ensure a fault free drive. Some cars, as I write this article are achieving Level 3 Car autonomy - drivers are still necessary in level 3 cars, but are able to completely shift "safety-critical functions" to the vehicle, under certain traffic or environmental conditions.