Life can get very hectic in the last two months before the beginning of a new year as it is the time for customers to renew IT contracts and invite us to bid for new testing opportunities. This is also a great time for two reasons:
The number of interactions with the customers / prospects increases.The quality of the interactions is much more substantial.
Questions from customers are direct and fundamental in nature, something that is less likely to happen during the daily grind of project execution. One such interaction with a Testing Head of one of the fast growing business lines led to a candid question – ‘What is the purpose of testing?’
While the response to the question was in progress, everybody around felt there was due merit in discussing the topic with a larger group separately.
This was followed by a long debate with the group which included the customer.
The talks about ‘analysis, diagnosis, defect finding, verifying, stability, performance,’ and many other purposes of testing were doing rounds, but after spending a considerable amount of time, everybody came to the conclusion that testing is carried out to ‘ensure that the end-user of the system will have a great experience using it.”
So, if this was the purpose of testing, then there could be many aspects to look at it.
First of all, the testing team needs to be involved in the SDLC testing phase completely and all artifacts must be tested. To ensure great quality in a product, the issues need to be unearthed at the earliest, most preferably in the introduction phase.
The second aspect is the capability of the testers. Many testers play an important role in verifying the product against its specification. Additionally, a deep insight into the end-user is much needed. Simulating the deployment is also equally critical.
Last but not the least, a tester needs to be the voice of ‘quality management’ and should constantly think of end-user experience. A tester is expected to frankly expose the issues of the product before it is released.
