The Skeptical Tester

Someone asked me recently what is the worst mistake a tester can make when starting out on a project. I didn’t have to dig very hard for my reply: “Believing what you’re told, and accepting what you’re given.” OK, that’s two mistakes. They’re inseparable.

Do I mean that every tester should go around vibrating with suspicion and saying, “Don’t give me that!”? No, of course not. That would be neither professional nor practical.

I mean that you should never assume that what you have been told is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Never believe that the documents you’ve been given contain all the information you will need to absorb and understand for testing the system. Never take as fact anything you haven’t taken trouble to question and, if possible, verify. Where you can’t verify and you need to move on, make working assumptions and then revisit them periodically to see if you’ve since learned anything that would prove or disprove them.

Testers are people who ask questions. We are skeptical people who examine critically all the information that comes our way and then go looking for what’s missing. We know critical questioning is essential to our work because the information we need is often scattered, buried, or not really known by anyone on the project. And sometimes projects nurture myths—commonly held beliefs that can obstruct, yet may collapse when probed.

On one big program where I was program test manager, everyone knew that all test personnel must have a particular certification. It was in the contract with our government client. My manager told me this when I started (although I possess no certification and they engaged me), and all my leads believed it. I was concerned that this requirement  would get in my way, but I had bigger problems to deal with and at least I seemed to be getting good functional testers.

But then I needed performance testers. Week after week I met with the hiring manager only to learn that we still hadn’t got the skilled people my performance test lead urgently required. I discovered that our recruiter was routinely turning away highly qualified performance testers on the sole ground that they weren’t certified.

This was crazy. Even in markets where most testers have certifications, performance testers typically don’t bother to certify. If we really were contractually bound, we would need to seek an exemption from the client. So I asked one of my leads to search our large and complex contract for the certification clause.

When finally unearthed, the clause read, “certification or equivalent experience.” So much for received belief! When we stopped acting on myth, we had no trouble recruiting the skilled people we needed.

On another project, I almost hit a showstopper through believing what I was told. To test the end-to-end integration of a new e-commerce site, I needed to have a coordinated dataset across a big suite of applications. None of the many planning, supply chain, or merchandising systems upstream from the online store was being changed for the project. We just needed to get product, pricing, and promotions data from them in the end-to-end test. The teams responsible for those systems were used to testing together, and they assured me they had a coordinated product set for use in all their integrated testing. They’d be ready to participate in the end-to-end test when I needed them.

Great! I focused my efforts on other urgent tasks. The online order management system and warehouse management system were new, and there were myriad associated changes to the many systems downstream, including