Jim Hazen - Testing Is Irrelevent, Shipping is Futile!
Jim Hazen - Testing Is Irrelevent, Shipping is Futile!
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May 14, 2009
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But who is going to Test the Testers
Recently UTest (www.utest.com) relaunched their public facing site. As part of that they are touting their abilities to help companies do testing via a "crowd source" approach. But it seems they didn't do a good job of testing of their own site.
After moving around on the site looking at things I found a 404 error for a link to a page. And this was on a page, and on a link, that will see some moderate to high level of traffic on it. You would think that they would have tested their own stuff better being that they are a 'testing' company.
After passing this tidbit on to Joe Strazzere for his "They probably should have tested better" hall of shame I got a response email with a list of other broken links that Joe found using Xenu Link Checker. Again, you think they would have run a link check test against their site before they launched. Nope.
According to their blog (http://blog.utest.com/kicking-off-a-new-era-utest/2009/05/), they " utilized our QA community to test the new site, blog and forums, as well as to conduct usability testing. This provided us a with great deal of valuable testing before we flipped the switch on this new version."
So while the testing may indeed have been valuable, it doesn't replace a few minutes of time from Professional Testers.
As you can see from the WebLog title I am a bit sarcastic and cynical about this thing we call Software Testing. Over my years of experience in Software Development and Testing I have seen some very very Dilbert things happen.
Hopefully this Blog will be a good place for you to learn from some of the things I have experienced and allow you to be more effective in your efforts in Software Testing.
• May 14, 2009 - But who is going to Test the Testers
Recently UTest (www.utest.com) relaunched their public facing site. As part of that they are touting their abilities to help companies do testing via a "crowd source" approach. But it seems they didn't do a good job of testing of their own site.
After moving around on the site looking at things I found a 404 error for a link to a page. And this was on a page, and on a link, that will see some moderate to high level of traffic on it. You would think that they would have tested their own stuff better being that they are a 'testing' company.
After passing this tidbit on to Joe Strazzere for his "They probably should have tested better" hall of shame I got a response email with a list of other broken links that Joe found using Xenu Link Checker. Again, you think they would have run a link check test against their site before they launched. Nope.
So who is going to 'test' the Testers? ;-)
• May 14, 2009 - Crowd Testing versus Professional Testing
So while the testing may indeed have been valuable, it doesn't replace a few minutes of time from Professional Testers.
• May 15, 2009 - Nice one