logo
logo
Sign in

Is your product ready for the test?

avatar
Fleek IT Solutions

At what point is your product ready for the test? That question is not always easy to answer, but you can ask more-easily-answered questions to draw out information that will tell you when you're not ready for test:

• Is there at least one question about your product that testing can help you answer? If there's no question, then there's no reason to test.

• Do you want to know the answer to that question? If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question— that is, don't bother testing.

• Are you merely idly curious about the results of testing? If you're not going to evaluate or act on the answers to your questions, forget testing. It's too expensive to be used just to satisfy idle curiosity. Active curiosity, on the other hand, is an important attribute of effective testing, because you'll never know exactly what you should be looking for. So, if you are ready to spend some time exploring, being curious will help you get your money's worth out of testing—if you follow through on what you discover.

• Can you agree with testers in advance as to what constitutes a passed test? If you don't agree about what is a passed test and what isn't, what are you looking for from your tests?

• Do you have an agreement in advance on what a successful test would look like? An unsuccessful test? Do you agree that any test that gives you new information is at least partially successful?

• Do you think the outcome of testing will make your decisions for you? Business decisions cannot be made from a purely technical perspective. Certainly use information from testing to color your business decisions, but don't substitute testing for business decisions. For example, it can be a good business decision to ship a system that fails one or more tests. Conversely, it can be a bad business decision to ship a system that passes all your tests. Management has to consider other factors in addition to test results.

• Conversely, is there any possible test outcome that would make you change your decisions? If not, why would you want to know the outcome, let alone pay for it?

collect
0
avatar
Fleek IT Solutions
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more